


Iterations

by perceived_nobility



Series: Iterations [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Addiction, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - College/University, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-12 04:06:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 56,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9054682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perceived_nobility/pseuds/perceived_nobility
Summary: it·er·a·tionˌitəˈrāSHən/nounthe repetition of a process or utterance.repetition of a mathematical or computational procedure applied to the result of a previous application, typically as a means of obtaining successively closer approximations to the solution of a problem.
In the end, people either die alone or find some way to keep living, together.





	1. Nights on the Bridge

**Author's Note:**

> This all started because I wanted to write a sad story about gay boys where their gayness was not the source of their sadness. As such, it's a pretty intense dive into heavy topics that might not be palatable for everyone. Please see the endnotes for more detailed descriptions of potentially triggering & uncomfortable themes in the piece.
> 
>  
> 
> Many thanks to @FelicityGS for the beta! 
> 
> This was partly (& very obliquely at this point) inspired by @Sparklyslug's excellent fic Quorum, though she doesn't know that yet.

NIGHT 1

Tony is honestly not expecting to see anyone else at the Longfellow Bridge at two a.m on a Wednesday in December.  He’s been counting, in fact, on there not being anybody else here.  Now, he has to either wait for the other kid to go away or walk across the bridge like he has somewhere else to go.

From the look of shock on the other kid’s face, he might be thinking much the same thing. He’d climbed up on the concrete railing, one leg raised as if to swing over it.  When he sees Tony, he lowers the leg slowly, guiltily, and looks away.

So it’s going to be a battle of wills, then. A test of patience. Or Tony could keep walking, pretend he didn’t see the kid’s precarious position, didn’t recognize the stillness in his face, and leave him to his night.  But Tony wants this to be his night and he’ll be damned if he’s going to cede it to some skinny, dark-haired kid just because they’d had the same idea at the same time.

So he walks closer than is polite before stopping and turning to look out at the river below.  It glimmers gold under halogen streetlights. Tony grips the railing and forces himself to stay still.

The kid doesn’t move. He keeps staring at his feet, or at the space between the railing and the walkway, looking like he wants to melt away. If he does, Tony thinks, he’ll look like an oil slick: dark with bright reflected color, smooth and unexpectedly beautiful. He doesn’t look at Tony and Tony pretends he isn’t looking at him.

The kid—it’s uncharitable of Tony to call him a kid; he looks at least as old as Tony is—has dark hair and skin so light that the narrow tracery of veins on his cheeks casts a blue tint to the shadows under his eyes. He doesn’t seem bothered by the cold that’s seeping under Tony’s collar and spreading icy fingers across his chest, making him fidget. The stillness in the kid’s face is poured through every line of his body, and Tony can’t help but think that he’s much more ready for this than Tony is.

“Helluva night,” Tony says. It’s not original but it breaks the silence. The kid finally looks at him and there’s something vaguely familiar about the sharp planes of his face.

“Typical for the season,” the kid says. His voice is surprisingly smooth, given the dryness of the air and the hours it feels like they’ve been standing here. There’s an accent under it, almost completely run over by the flatness of American vowels, but still discernible.  Tony bets he still under-pronounces his r’s.

“Timeless view,” Tony adds, or agrees. He gets the feeling that both of them are trying to make the other one go away. But for his part, he gave up before he opened his mouth the first time. He’s cold in a way that’s beginning to make him sore and that’s not how he wants to do this. He thinks the other kid will probably stick with it if Tony leaves, though, and for some reason Tony finds that he doesn’t want that. 

“I’m sure it will still be here tomorrow.” Yep, the kid swallows his r’s.

“Nuh-uh. Tomorrow they’re lighting the tree at the quad.” Tony jerks a thumb behind him, towards campus, “You’d be able to see it from here.”

“My mistake then.” The kid’s smile is cracked and empty. “It’ll be better.”

“Only if you’re celebrating.” The kid’s eyes sweep over Tony, lingering on his face. He raises an eyebrow.

“Light without a source has enchanted humanity for eons.  It’s a better view no matter your belief.”

“Will you be back for it?”  Tony asks.  The kid’s eyes drop to the river again and he says nothing.  “Well I’ll be here.”  Tony folds himself into a sitting position and pulls his knees to his chest.  The concrete is brutally cold under him but he shivers and warms up a little.  He tilts his head back and stares at the sky, painted a sickly yellowish gray with smog.  Patches of dark float by, but never clear enough to reveal the stars.  The kid is a long black column to his right.  The thick wool coat makes him look a little like a monolith standing against whatever Tony might throw at him.  His eyes are a bright, iridescent green, Tony realizes, turning his head to look up into them.

“Hi,” Tony says quietly.  

Tony stays there until the sky starts to lighten and traffic picks up across the bridge.  The kid stays, too, looking out at the water or out at the skyline or down at Tony.  He leaves as the sun rises, painting a side of him gold as his shadow stretches off the bridge, falling into the river.

Tony waits until he can’t see him anymore before he cracks his stiff knuckles and levers himself to his feet.  He takes the bridge to the north, thinking about how, in the northern hemisphere, the sun falls more on the south face of things. 

#

NIGHT 2

The next night, Tony gets to the bridge just after sunset, carrying a shopping bag heavy with a new thermos and Styrofoam cups.  He’s dressed for the weather this time, in a hat and gloves and a scarf.  They’re all new with the tags bitten off on the way here, so if he does end up leaving them they won’t be identified as his.  The kid isn’t there yet, so Tony settles himself at the same part of the bridge as yesterday and tries to make himself inconspicuous.

The pavement is still warm from the sun and Tony hasn’t really slept in weeks, so he dozes under the perpetual twilight of the street lamps with his chin tucked into his scarf.

He’s woken sometime later by a voice.  “You’re making this very difficult for me.”  Tony grunts and lurches to his feet, jumping up and down a few times to get his blood flowing again.

“You don’t have to let me.  Buy a gun or something.”

The other kid scoffs and kicks a cigarette butt off the railing.  The two of them stay silent as it falls.  “Guns are inelegant.”

“Knives?” 

“Also inelegant.”

“Pills?”

The kid stares, long and hard and condescending, at Tony.  “Don’t patronize me.”  He sounds bored.

“Did you ever stop to think about that word?  Patronize?  It sounds like you’re asking someone to not buy something from you.”  Tony reaches down and takes out the thermos and a cup.  “But you’re free to patronize me.  Coffee?”  He fills the cup and hands it over.  The kid takes it, face twitching with half a smile, and holds it up to blow the heat out of it.  Steam puffs up with his breath and floats slowly into nothingness.  Tony pours himself a cup and scalds his lips trying to drink it right away.  He licks his lips and settles for blowing on it like the kid.  “I like knowing the names of my patrons.  I’m Tony.”

“Loki.”  The kid sips his coffee slowly and swallows.

“Good to meet you, Loki.”  Loki grimaces and sips again at his coffee.  Tony slurps his loudly, watching as Loki’s face twitches with distaste.  There’s silence for a moment.  Tony shifts, restless, squeezing his cup and looking out at the city.  He honestly doesn’t know what to do now.  As long as he’s here and Loki’s here he’s doing OK, but he’s at a loss as how to perpetuate that.  He clears his throat a couple times and scrapes his feet against the sidewalk.

Loki has apparently decided to throw him a bone.  “The tree is lit.”

Tony turns and looks over at the quad—distant, but close enough to the riverbank that it’s mostly unobstructed by buildings.  The tree almost looks like a lit pyre with the density of lights hung on it.  Tony sighs, impressed before he can remember not to be.

“See?  Universal human fascination.”

There’s silence again, a silence Tony doesn’t know how to break.  The questions he thinks of to ask are useless and redundant: What are your plans for Christmas?  Where’s your family from?  Do you want to talk about it?

Loki’s looking at him over his cup of coffee, eyebrows furrowed like Tony’s some sort of fascinating puzzle.  And for the second time that night, he saves the situation.

“Why are you doing this?”  

It takes Tony awhile to answer, because if he does this wrong then there goes everything and he might stay away one night and convince himself of the worst and then come back the next night alone.

“Because I  _ can _ .”  He feels his voice break as he says it so he addresses his reflection, distant and blurry on the water below.  “This is something I can do.  I can walk here at night and maybe bring coffee.  I can stand here and freeze my ass off and maybe say things once in awhile.”  He could go on, talk about how nice it was to see a face that wasn’t exasperated or pitying or so cheerful it hurt to look at.  How if he could do just a little bit of what he decided was good each day it made the next day something he could at least pretend to think about.

“Mm,”Loki says.  

A car passes behind them, one of the few out this late.  Its headlights sweep over the two of them as it whines up and roars away.  Tony watches Loki’s eyes follow it.

“The golds of Heaven and the fires of Hell and humanity’s caught in between,” Loki says, sounding like he hates saying it.

“I was reminded more of the Doppler Effect,” Tony replies.

“You’re a physicist.”

“And you don’t call yourself one.”

“I always thought that physics was an excellent metaphor for reality,” Loki returned.  “How something approaching you sounds desperate and when it’s going away it sounds relieved.”

“Do you believe physics accurately describes the world?”

The look Loki gives him is exasperated, but not so much as to hide his interest completely.  “Like all metaphors, it’s accurate up to a point.  But even the great minds of science know this: the boundary between Newtonian and quantum scales is ever-elusive to you.”

“So’s the boundary between Heaven and Hell,” Tony points out.  Loki swigs the rest of his coffee and scoffs.

“I study religion. I don’t ascribe to it.  That’s the danger: the moment you mistake a metaphor for truth.”  His expression is a challenge but he holds out his empty cup for more coffee.

Tony can’t help grinning as he pours it.  “Then curse me and call me an Evangelical.” HE raises his own nearly empty cup in a toast.  This time Loki says nothing, and Tony knows he’s passed the torch.

“Science is comforting.  It’s consistent.  If I were to jump off this bridge—“ Loki’s face doesn’t change “—well let’s say fall.  So my starting velocity is zero.  By the time I hit the water I’m traveling at terminal velocity and the force of me hitting the river is like I’m hitting concrete.  If I’ve swan-dived, it’ll rip my chest open and crush my internal organs.  If I’m vertical, it will shatter my legs and drive bone splinters up into my guts.  After my heart stops, I’ll have a minute or so of continued brain function before that stops because of oxygen depletion.  My body will float to the surface, utterly broken, and I will be aware of nothing else.  There will be no Judgement, no afterlife where I’ll see all my relatives again and no rebirth into a different body.  I will be gone.

“If I’m not sure--if I acknowledge that anything could be possible—then I no longer have a way out.  I’m trapped no matter what I do.  And you can’t run statistics on traits you can’t measure.”

“Will you be here tomorrow night?” Loki asks after a pause.

Tony nods.  “Yes.”

“Perhaps I should find another bridge.”

“Maybe.  I like the view from this one myself.”

Loki slides down to sit on the sidewalk and leans back against the stone buttress.  He closes his eyes and sighs.

Tony stands for awhile longer, finishing the thermos of coffee.  His chest is hot and tight; his fingers are shaking; his jaw hurts with the pressure of keeping it shut.  He wants to reach out into the air and grab back everything he’s said.  He wants to have never met Loki.  He wants to leave.

But Loki’s still there, heavy like an anchor that draws Tony’s gaze.  By the way he’s listed to the side, like his head is pulling the rest of his body down with it, Tony guesses he’s asleep.  His hands are beginning to tinge blue where they’re splayed against the sidewalk, so Tony shrugs out of his coat and drapes it across Loki’s shoulders.  It’s dawn and the air is bitingly cold.  Tony picks up the two coffee cups and places them in the bag with the thermos.  He leaves as quietly as he can, though his footsteps are drowned out by the rumblings of early commute traffic across the bridge.  Cars anxious as they approach, relieved as they disappear.

 

#

NIGHT 3

When Tony reaches the bridge on the third night, he finds Loki waiting for him, pacing agitatedly along the sidewalk.  Tony can see his coat folded neatly on the railing.  When Loki turns at the far end of his axis and sees Tony, he lunges for the coat and storms over.  There’s something feral and ugly in his face, something cracked.  “You!”  His voice is cracked, too.  “You left your jacket with me!”  Tony puts his hands up, palms out, ready to explain.  “How dare you!”  Loki stuffs the jacket against Tony’s chest and stares at him for a long moment, all broken quartz and hate, until the shaking in his shoulders reaches his gut and he steps away, coughing and choking on tears.  Tony sets his jacket on the railing and stands, unassuming and still, a few feet from Loki.  

He wants to scream, but if he can do  _ this _ then tomorrow is something he can almost pretend to think about.

Eventually, Loki sits and when he does, Tony sits beside him, not touching, staring out at the water.  When it’s mostly silent, Tony dares to speak.

“You could have found a different bridge.”

“Fuck you.”

Tony shuts his mouth.

“Did you bring coffee again?”  Loki finally asks.  Tony leans over, grabs his bag, and pulls it closer.  He pours them both full cups and they are silent for awhile, drinking.

“Why this bridge?”  Tony asks.  He’d been on the verge of saying something else, confessing something, but the words wouldn’t leave his throat.  

“Convenience,” Loki mumbles into his coffee cup.  This time, he reaches across Tony to pour himself a refill.  “And who said you had a right to ask.”

“I did.”  His answer is immediate, hard and defiant.  Loki stares at him and Tony wonders if he can see the years behind that response.  “You didn’t have to answer though,” he adds guiltily, after.  And then, after another few moments, “Though if you’re going to answer, don’t lie to me.”

“Why shouldn’t I lie to you.  I owe you nothing!”

“Never said you did.”

“You  _ left _ me with your  _ jacket _ !”

“A jacket isn’t a contract.”

“ _ Yes _ it  _ is _ !”  Loki’s on his feet again and waving his arms like he’s wielding a weapon.  “You left me with your jacket, which of course I  _ have _ to  _ return _ to you, and, and you tell me you’re going to be here when I’m here and if I don’t come then, then I don’t even know what you would do so I have to come back here and give you back your  _ stupid jacket _ —” He stops, spins towards the railing and Tony’s up to stop him—he feels something wet on his shoes and he must have kicked over the coffee—but Loki curls over and vomits violently into the river.  Tony reaches him in time to catch hold of most of his hair and brush it back from his face.  There’s a roiling in his gut and he’s afraid for a moment that he’s going to vomit, too.  It’s not that Tony’s not used to holding people’s hair while they puke—he’s hosted far too many parties for that—but without a bathtub or the distant thud of base in the background, he doesn’t know what to do.  Meanwhile, Loki’s dropped so he’s hanging—desperately, with hands that look more like frosted ice than flesh—from the railing, weight on his heels as he stares through the struts at the water, panting hard.  Tony runs a careful hand through his hair and Loki bows his head, not pulling away as Tony feared, but offering.  Tony—terrified, short of breath, feeling like he’s made of piano wire stretched so tight it wouldn’t bend but snap—accepts.

“Come on,” he says, “Let’s get some water.”

His original idea had been to take Loki to the lab.  He has a sleeping bag there, a futon, a cabinet full of noodle soups and a microwave.  He makes it through the door of the building before he chickens out.  Loki’s been trailing behind him, staring at the concrete whenever Tony turned around to check, and sometimes he would lean out into Tony’s peripheral vision and spit.  Tony’s keys jangle, loud, in the night.

“There’s a bathroom down the hall,” he says.  The words catch in his throat.  Loki nods.  He looks tired, like the walk from the bridge has drained him, step by step.  The bathroom door is propped open, the door jamb left in place by a forgetful janitor.  Tony slides down the wall, watching Loki shamble over, noticing idly that he doesn’t look in the mirrors. Instead, he splashes water on his face and slurps it shallowly from his hands, curled over the sink.  The grainy fluorescent light makes Loki look paler, gives his skin an almost blue tone that reminds Tony of frostbite, but terrifyingly, painfully alive.  But then again, that’s why they’re here, anyway.

“Thank you,” Loki says when he’s done and standing next to Tony, so close that Tony can smell the cold on him.  Loki fidgets, though not more than Tony wants to, fingers twisting in the hem of his shirt and it only makes Tony feel worse.  It’s a choking, chilling feeling that Tony wishes he could put into words.

“I’m sorry,” he and Loki say at almost the same time.

“Do you have a lab here?” Loki asks.  Tony nods.

“I work in one, anyway.  As a grad student.  It’s—it’s what we do.  Grad students.”

“Can I see?”  Loki sounds tired again—or, more correctly, he  _ still _ sounds tired, and Tony resolves not to blather on anymore.  The effort he’s costing Loki is so obvious he feels like he’s choking on it.  “Can I see your lab?”  Loki asks again, and Tony realizes that he  _ means _ it: for whatever reason, he wants to see inside Tony’s life and Tony doesn’t have a readymade reason to say “no”.

He tells Loki the combination to the lab and waits in the hallway, pressing his jacket flat into his lap and chewing on the insides of his cheeks.  Eventually a shadow falls over him.  “It’s very nice,” Loki says.  Tony shrugs, staring at his lap.  “Masters or PhD?”

“Both.”  He’s staring at Loki’s shoes now: black-on-black Converse under black skinny jeans.  They’re torn at the ball of the foot: not new.  Tony watches Loki shift his weight, watches the soles of his shoes press against the Linoleum floor.  He thinks about force and acceleration and how he would sit like this at recess, every recess, and then during lunch in high school until someone came by and asked what was  _ wrong _ with him.  He thinks more about force.  “There’s a futon in the back room.  You can use it if you want.  Just don’t touch anything.”

There’s a careful silence before Loki answers.

“I will owe you nothing?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Then I would appreciate not having to walk home tonight.”

Tony levers himself off the floor and shows Loki the futon, the ratty sleeping bag and pilfered throw pillow that go with it.  His hands are shaking a little as he does so and he can’t tell from Loki’s face if he sees it.  He hangs around awkwardly, watching Loki shake out the sleeping bag and fluff the pillow until Loki starts watching Tony watch him.  Then Tony makes some garbled excuse to leave and shuts the door firmly behind him.

He’s faced with his lab—well, the lab where he works—with the discarded skeletons of robots heaped across benches, the stale smell of old pizza and mold thickening the air.  The other benches are clean: neat articulated arms lie on bare countertops, cans of lubricating oil and coils of electrical wire pressed tightly together on the overhead shelves.  Shop towels hang on rolls by the sinks: a bank of computers at the back, screens uniformly dark.  Tony shoves a dented chassis off his chair so he can sit down.  His head feels heavy and thick, though whether it’s from sleep deprivation or adrenaline or dread, he can’t tell.  Loki might be shut away for now—no sound comes through the back room door, though Tony knows the walls are thin enough that he can hear footsteps back there if the lab is quiet—but he’ll still be there in the morning.  Tony’s never seen Loki in daylight, not really, and he tries to imagine how the rules will be different.

He doesn’t know how much time passes, but it’s not nearly enough.  He stands and kicks a toolbox out of his way so he can reach the coffeemaker.  There are still grounds in it from the workday so he pours in a new carafe’s worth of water and drinks the resulting swill that tastes like hot, soggy ash.  He thinks about laziness, about inertia, about points of inflection.

If he can do this, he can pretend to think about tomorrow.

#

DAY 4

A hand claps sharply on his shoulder and just for a moment—for the smallest, most fleeting moment—it’s a different hand and there’s sunlight on his shoulders and he’s five years old and bad is a word he applies to the taste of food.  But a headache slams into his temples and his tongue is tacky and stale in his mouth and there’s a voice hissing and spitting in his ear and all Tony wants is to  _ leave _ .

“Tony, Tony you gotta wake up there’s a weird guy sleeping in our lab.”

“Fuck off, Hammer.”

He shrugs the hand off his shoulder and presses his face into the crook of his elbow.  Aches and pains are unfurling all down his spine, pricking at his knees, his wrists.

“I’m serious Tony I know you never listen to me but please I think someone broke into our lab and he’s sleeping in the back room and nobody else is here yet and he’s freaking me out can you please do something—“

“Leave him alone.  Leave me alone.  It’s fine.”  Tony coughs, trying to work moisture back into his mouth, and sits up.  He hears Hammer move away from him, probably back to his bench.  The light filtering through his eyelids is uncomfortably bright, but he opens his eyes anyway.

His cup of coffee is still half full.  He drains it.

The terror hits him before the caffeine does.  It slams through him, all the way to the tips of his fingers, cold and electric. The lab door is less than twenty feet away.  He could run.  He decides to call it a victory every moment that he doesn’t.

There’s a rustling from the back room that means Loki’s awake.  Tony heads to the coffeemaker, tosses out yesterday’s grounds and sets about making a fresh pot.  He hopes he’ll be busy when Loki steps into the lab, hopes he’ll be spared from knowing what Loki looks like before he knows people are looking at him.

“Hello.”  

Loki’s voice is behind him and Tony breathes a sigh of relief.  He turns, his lab bench between them, and smiles. 

“Morning.  Do you want some coffee?”  He gestures at the coffeemaker, which wheezes steam at him, “It’ll be ready in a few minutes.”  Loki stares at him for a moment, mouth small in his pale face.  It makes Tony wonder what he isn’t saying.  Dark circles ring his eyes, making him look like he’s been punched, and his cheekbones cast alabaster shadows on his hollow cheeks.  He looks more like a skeleton in daylight than he ever has at night, and Tony can’t help but think that that’s fitting.  

Loki’s gaze has shifted off of Tony, towards the other end of the lab, where Hammer is banging around at something.  He still hasn’t answered Tony’s question.  

“Do you want to leave?” Tony asks quietly.  He’d thought it would be his way of saving the conversation like Loki had last night, but now that he says it he wonders if it’s just him saving himself.  Loki nods, shoving his hands in his pockets.

Outside, the air crackles with cold.  Icicles hang like tinsel from the streetlights and frost crunches underneath their feet.  Tony heads to the closest coffee shop, housed in the basement of the library.  The servers know him here and this morning he wishes they didn’t, but it’s close and it’ll be warm and he can hear Loki’s teeth chattering next to him.  He tries to pay for Loki’s drink but Loki won’t let him; Tony backs off, remembering the jacket and wondering what exactly he’s trying to apologize for.  They take their coffee into the back corner, where they slump into saggy, threadbare armchairs.

“Sleep OK?” Tony asks.  It sounds polite and it breaks the silence and Loki really, really looks like he didn’t.

“Well enough.”

Loki’s toying with his cup more than he’s drinking out of it, long fingers tapping on the ceramic, twining through the handle and springing out again as if they’re skittery animals afraid of being trapped.

“Do you have anything else to do today?”

Loki looks at him—really looks, looks so hard Tony wants to shrivel up and crawl away—before answering.  “I’m not enrolled in any classes.”

“Okay.”

The coffee is hot and bitter and dark.  It burns Tony’s throat as he swallows.

“I told everyone I was studying abroad in Germany.”

“Mm.”

Loki digs the nails of one hand into the meat of the other so hard that the flesh blanches white around them. Tony has the insane urge to reach out and make him stop.

“My lease runs out at the end of the month.”  Loki looks up at him, staring past him, eyes fixed on Tony’s left shoulder or maybe his ear, but definitely not at his face.  “There’s a storm coming in tonight.  You should stay at home.”

Loki stands, one long, fluid motion full of purpose; he’s gone before Tony can move, his cup gone with him, and by the time Tony forces himself to turn and try to find him he’s out of the shop, past a door that skids shut behind him, bringing with it the scent of fresh, frigid air.

#

DAY 4: PART 2

Tony somehow makes it back to the lab, head buzzing, and forces himself to sit at his bench.  The pile of unfinished circuits leers at him: drill bits sticking out like broken teeth, cracked motherboards with transistors like a multitude of eyes.  Across the lab, there’s the low hum of electricity and the occasional curse as Hammer solders something to somewhere it shouldn’t be.  Tony’s mildly surprised—and relieved—that he doesn’t come over to ask Tony for help.  

At some point, Hammer leaves and returns with a plastic bag that smells like Chinese food; Tony assumes it’s lunchtime and locks himself in the back room for awhile under the pretense of eating something he brought from home.  The coffee from earlier roils in his stomach and he stares blankly at the futon where Loki slept last night.  There’s a whorl of wrinkles in its cotton slipcover right about where someone’s ass would be if they sat up to tie their shoes.  Tony has a weird urge to touch it, like there might be some residual Loki-ness there, something to remind him of an actual person who had actually talked to him and accepted his generosity.

Part of his mind is telling him that he shouldn’t take a threat that sounds like it came straight out of a high fantasy novel too seriously.  The rest of it is screaming, bright orange inarticulate rage, loud and pressing against his ears.  It makes it difficult to think and presses outward against his skull like a headache.

He wanders out into the lab again and shifts some blueprints around to make it look like he’s working.  He checks the weather forecast on his cell phone more and more often, each time feeling a drop of dread when he sees the moon avatar unobstructed by clouds.  He doesn’t know who he feels betrayed by: Loki, or the anonymous weather station that gathered meteorological data and the engineers who wrote the algorithms to translate that into a series of complex probability functions.  

Hammer leaves without speaking to him—another relief—and he gets up to rinse out the carafe and brew a fresh cup of coffee.  He dumps out the pot from this morning—untouched and cold—and as the dregs swirl down the drain he thinks about gravity and the dead weight of mass and the inescapability of black holes.  It isn’t until he hears a clattering against the window that he realizes it’s hailing; vicious stones the size of golf balls that clunk against the glass and bounce off again.  His phone has at least registered this as possible: a wispy cloud covers the moon graphic and the text begrudgingly warns him of a 10% chance of rain.  The coffee maker gurgles and hisses behind him, a warm opposition to the weather.  Going out now would probably be nothing short of masochism, any journey a slow process of being stoned.

Tony realizes sharply that he has a choice to make about how much he wants to hate himself.  He thinks about his childhood, about the empty bed of his parents like the empty futon in the next room: just memories of a touch, of intention, of ideas given flesh.  He thinks about the intention he doesn’t ascribe to the heavens, how every hailstone that would strike his flesh would not be a judgement on his character.

He unplugs the coffeemaker and pours the half pot of coffee down the drain.  He reaches into the cupboard below it and pulls out a clear glass bottle, nearly full.  He doesn’t even bother with a glass.

#

NIGHT 4

Tony doesn’t know how long it takes for the room to grow hot and close around him.  The air is heavy with old breath. This always happens and part of him—a small part, but a part that never  _ stops talking _ —wonders if he wanted this.

It’s still hailing outside and he finds it strange because it’s been eternities since he last looked and he’s pretty sure that hail storms don’t usually last that long.

He realizes as he stumbles into the storm—the first blocks of ice hit his shoulders and it  _ hurts _ , thank  _ god _ that it hurts—that he’s forgotten a jacket; he discovers he still has standards when he hauls himself back to the lab to grab it.  It’s too late—it’s always too late and it has always been too late and it will always be too late—so what difference will another few minutes make.  He remembers that a few months ago, he’d convinced himself that an infinity of minutes that don’t make a difference is still an infinity, but now that logic looks blurred and slippery against the jagged teeth of the hailstones that gnaw on his scalp.

He can barely see the bridge before he hits it: the hail is driving hard and thick, joined by icy rain that splatters against the pavement like breaking bones.  A shout, thin and brittle, sounds from in front of him.  It’s answered by a roar low enough to be thunder.  It isn’t until someone slams into the railing a few feet away that he realizes that the sounds are from  _ here _ , that they might be for  _ him _ , that the shout was  _ Loki _ and that suddenly, inexplicably, it is no longer too late.

Somehow, Loki isn’t the one pinned to the railing.  It’s a big guy, blonde hair plastered into coiling fingers down his neck, looking like a boulder.  Loki’s hands are fisted at his chest, thin arms locked.

“If you love me,” Loki spits, “You will let me do this.”

The big guy worms his hands up to Loki’s wrists.  The gesture looks affectionate until Loki cries out in pain and jerks away.  “I love you! You’re my  _ brother!  _ This is madness!”

“Is it madness?”  Loki is a whip, tight and raw.  “Is it?  _ Is it _ !”

He lunges to the side; the big guy follows, tackling him to the ground and getting on top of him.  Loki’s screaming, fists beating against the big guy’s shoulder.  He’s not even using words anymore; his voice is pain, bleeding through the clattering hail and the din in Tony’s head.

Tony is on the big guy, hands around his chest, trying with all his might to roll him to the side.  The guy roars, breaks his hold on Loki and there’s a mass of angry in Tony’s face, flipping him like he’s no heavier than goose down and crashing into his sternum.

Black bursts in Tony’s vision.  His limbs are slow and too long.  His head is hot, which is wrong because it’s cold out and he’s being pelted all over.  He tries to curl in on himself but there’s something in his way, something large over his torso and on his arms and  _ snarling _ at him and Tony would scream if only he could breathe.

He’s being hauled to his feet by the front of his jacket when his breath comes back.  He draws in air like a baby taking its first lungful and like a baby when he lets it out he  _ screams _ .  The big guy looks shocked for a second and Tony shoves him, trying to force him backward and duck away at the same time.  An arm catches him under the chin and slams him back against the railing.  It hurts, but Tony lashes out with his feet, hears more than feels one hit bone; the guy collapses and Tony runs.

He almost trips over Loki, lying where the big guy had dropped him.  He’s on his side, curled up, both hands on the back of his head like he’s trying to keep his brains from falling out.  Tony kneels over him—almost falls: the sidewalk tilts and then rights itself—and pats his arm.

“Loki it’s Tony are you OK?”

Loki opens his eyes.  They’re glassy and unfocused an Tony remembers this is  _ bad _ .

“Loki listen to me it’s going to be OK just--just--”

He pats around Loki’s body, watching for a response and feeling for blood.  The concrete is warm behind his head in a way that makes Tony’s stomach lurch.

“Stay away from my brother!”  Tony feels himself jerk backward; he writhes, watching Loki slide away from him.

“Get  _ off me _ !” he shouts before pain splashes through the side of his skull.  It hurts, hard and insistent, as he feels the ground smack against his feet.  His vision goes white and gray and for a minute all he can see is the rain.  The hail drumming on his shoulders feels soft enough to fall asleep on.  He wonders idly, while trying to convince his legs to keep him upright, when he last felt dry.

 

Someone is already slumped in the holding cell when Tony gets poured into it.  Homeless and old, Tony decides, blinking against the light: the guy looks like he’s drowning in a ratty Army surplus coat and the flesh of his face sags off the bones like melted wax.  His toes poke through the frayed seams of his boots.

Tony curls up as best he can on the cell’s cold metal bench.  The handcuffs scrape against his wrists as he worms his arms around his knees.  He stares at the wall and tries to forget how pale Loki looked against the deep blue of a shock blanket.

The cell door clangs and a girl stumbles in, chaperoned by two officers.  She’s older than Tony, he thinks, but not by much.  She has a run in her hose and black streaks of makeup down her cheeks.  She tries to sit next to Tony but he scoots away.

Time passes so slowly that Tony can’t tell if he’s blinking or sliding into sleep and waking up again.  The light in the room doesn’t change; the two other prisoners don’t move, except for the girl crossing and uncrossing her legs.  She breathes through her mouth, Tony realizes eventually.  

It takes him another eternity to figure out that it bothers him.

The flashing of the ambulance lights through the rain seems brighter each time he thinks about them and he can tell the alcohol is trickling out of his bloodstream, leaving a dull throbbing at his temples and a dryness in his veins.  

Loki has to be at the hospital by now.  Tony imagines his stretcher being whisked through the ER lobby; he pictures Loki’s pale face bleached under white operating room lights as someone sews his head shut.  Tony lurches to the corner of the cell and vomits.  The other two turn away from him like they’re ashamed.

Eventually an officer shows up in the shadow of a tall man in a black suit and a white cravat.  Obie looks like he’s just come from a fancy dinner and Tony thinks that he might have: it’s almost Christmas and the bigwigs have probably started looking for ways to be conspicuously generous.  Tony stands and hobbles over to the door.  He feels weak and not entirely solid and he knows if he looks up he will see every detention, every suspension, every cracked rib and wasted midnight that Obie’s ever had to come rescue him etched into the set of Obie’s shoulders.  He feels a warm, huge hand clap him on the shoulder—thumb on one side of his neck and fingers on the other—and he follows the pressure of that hand out of the sheriff’s office and across the sidewalk to a town car that’s gleaming and dry and it must have stopped hailing some time ago but he slides into the back seat ahead of Obie without thinking about it too hard.  His stomach hurts because it’s so empty but he reminds himself he’s used to it.

“Whaddaya doin’ Tony,” Obie says after the car pulls away from the curb.  Tony stares at the back of the seat in front of him and shrugs tightly.  “The board members don’t like it when I have to come get you from a jail.  I try to tell them you’re young and reckless but they don’t want your mug shots to come up when people Google the company.”

Tony stares at his knees. The denim of his jeans dissolves into soft static when he lets his eyes unfocus.  He hears Obie shift around in the seat but doesn’t look over.

“I got you covered though, Tony.  These guys will keep quiet about your arrest and I’ll see who I can bribe to get your record expunged.  Think you can do something in return for me, huh, Tony?”

Tony shrugs again.

“I found some more blueprints of your dad’s the other day.  Really genius stuff.  He had a way with energy systems, you know?  Anyway the boys in R&D can’t figure out what to do with ‘em and I think they’d be just the thing to keep the board members happy for the holidays.  I’ll send them over in the morning and you can maybe fab something up for me by Friday.  OK Tony? Great.”

Stomach acid still burns in his mouth and tingles at the back of his teeth.  Tony swallows down a retort and just nods.  

“But really Tony?  Assault? Starks are too good for that kind of thing, huh? You’ve got billions of dollars worth of weapons behind you, why’d you need to tackle someone?”  Obie chuckles and it reminds Tony of a chainsaw on low.  “I remember when I was your age, Tony.  Young and reckless.  But I didn’t have a company to inherit, did I?  Still, I got into my fare share of scraps.  I got scraped up plenty, Tony, just like you.  And look where I ended up.”

#

DAY 5

The car drops Tony off in front of a glass-walled apartment building he barely recognizes as his own.  It takes him two tries to get his door number right and he’s not sure if it’s because the numbers are swimming in front of him or if he’s willfully tried to forget where he lives.  When he opens the door the air inside is dry and crisp like unfolded paper.  He makes it to the couch before the world closes in around him and it’s all he can do just to shut his eyes and stare at the colors blooming behind his eyelids and pretend they are galaxies, far away and huge, the space between them enough to drown him and swallow him whole.

It takes him a long time to fall asleep, or maybe it doesn’t.  He has no idea what time it is when he wakes.

When he finally convinces himself to get up, he finds his back and shoulders ache deep in the bones.  His head throbs from the booze and stings where he was punched; his throat rasps with each breath.  He stumbles into the shower, noticing the bruises blooming blue and purple on his arms, thick and sausagey like the fingers of the big guy who’d attacked him—attacked Loki, too—and he thinks about rain and rivers and the vortexes of currents.

It occurs to him that Loki is alive somewhere, probably, wrapped up in itchy hospital blankets and being drip-fed sedatives.  He imagines dark hair tangled on a white pillowcase and a windowsill bare of flowers.  He remembers the beeping of heart monitors and dread shakes his body.

He should go visit.  He should find out if Loki’s OK.

He has no idea where Loki would have been taken and the question of if he’s OK is childish to ask because the answer is shouted to the sky every time he breathes.

The guy who beat Loki up said Loki was his brother.  He told the police the same thing when he pointed to Tony—“and then this guy came out of nowhere and attacked me and then my brother”—and he probably is sitting at the side of Loki’s hospital bed right fucking now just waiting for Loki to try something so he can wail on him some more.

Tony slides into clothes he finds in the closet—he’s somewhat surprised that they fit him, though he figures he must have purchased them at some point—and tries to remember where he might have left his phone.

It turns out that only one “Loki” was checked into an area hospital the night before; Tony keys in the address and stares at the red line connecting his apartment and it.  It’s halfway across town but that’s not the part that matters.  Staring at the screen, Tony feels like he’s at one end of a tin can telephone: if he presses his ear hard enough, he can almost hear Loki muttering.  It’s the first time he’s been able to  _ find _ Loki if he wanted to; it’s a weird feeling of permanence, because no matter where Tony goes in the near future, Loki will still be at Point B.

There’s a half-empty box of stale cereal in the kitchen and Tony forces down a few handfuls. He debates making coffee, decides against it, leaves, dives back inside before the door closes to grab his keys, pats his pockets to make sure he has his wallet, grabs a jacket at the last minute.  It hits as he thunders down the stairs that the fluttering in his gut is  _ excitement _ and he watches the shrinking thread between Points A and B with a giddy fascination as he’s hauled along the subway.  

He finds Loki’s room with the help of a tiny nurse who returns the rictus on Tony’s face with an actual smile.  He barges in ahead of her, afraid if he waits to knock on the doorframe he’ll run before Loki has time to answer.

“Hi,” he blurts.

Loki stares up at him from below a thick bundle of gauze.  His hair isn’t splayed against the pillow as Tony’d imagined: it’s tucked over his shoulder in a thin, stumpy ponytail.  The white of his face and the pale gauze and pillowcase make it look like his body is dissolving above the shoulders.  His hands are folded over his chest, one finger scratching idly at the tape that holds an IV needle to the back of his other hand.

“Tony,” he says.  He sounds surprised.

“I can leave,” Tony says quickly.  This is intimate, very intimate; he watches Loki’s collarbones jump when he swallows.  He sits, very suddenly, in a chair by the wall and tents his fingers on his knees so he can look at those instead.

“Good job leaving,” Loki tells him, but there’s no venom in it.  A heart monitor beeps in the background like the world’s most dangerous metronome. 

“I try my best.”

There’s silence between them for awhile; it’s familiar, if not yet comfortable.  Light filters in through a window to Loki’s right, catching on curtains patterned after paintings done by a preschooler.  The windowsill is empty of flowers.

“How are you?”  Tony asks because it’s what he came here to ask.  Loki shifts on the bed, grimaces, looks out the window.  Tony follows his gaze, noticing for the first time that he can look out on the river from here.  It’s small against the city, a defiant curve in the straight lines of streets.  

“How was jail?”  Loki asks instead of answering.

“Nothing new.  I don’t even think they’d repainted.”

A pause, not quite long enough.  “You’ve been to jail before?”

“Once or twice.”

Loki’s staring at him but he drops his eyes when he notices Tony looking back.

“How are you?” Tony asks again.  Loki’s fingers twist in the blanket, drawing it closer around him.  It’s pale blue, a color so soothing it gets used in the least soothing places Tony can think of.

“Sick of being asked.”  Loki beats a fist softly against the mattress.  “You know they’re going to put me in therapy?  When they release me.  Fucking therapy.”

“Sucks.”

Tony doesn’t honestly know if it sucks or not, but it seems like it’s what Loki wants him to say.  He’s pretty sure Obie would never put him in therapy: the last thing the company would need is a future CEO who’s diagnosably crazy.

Loki snorts, crosses his arms.  It makes him look more like the guy Tony met on the bridge at midnight, the guy who’d rather wait for hours in the cold than go pick a different place to die.  It’s heartening, but Tony wonders if it shouldn’t be.

“I should have gotten there sooner last night,” he says by way of apology.  Loki narrows his eyes and sets his jaw.

“Why.”  

Tony gets the impression there is at least one wrong answer. “You got beaten up pretty badly,” he points out. “Maybe I coulda prevented that.”

Loki huffs at him.  “No you couldn’t have.  He followed me from my apartment.  I kept thinking I’d lose him or he’d give up, but he’s just tenacious as he used to be.”

“Tenacity is not the same thing as leaving someone in a pool of his own blood on the sidewalk.  Who the fuck  _ does _ that, anyway?”  

There’s a smirk playing across Loki’s mouth that’s annoying him more than it should.

“Thor, demonstrably.”

“Thor?”

“Thor.”

“Is everyone in your family named after a deity?”

“He’s not family.”  Loki’s tone could cut steel.  He starts picking at the IV tape in earnest.

“He called you brother,” Tony says cautiously.  Then, just as cautiously, “You shouldn’t do that.”

“What.”

Tony points.  “Pick at your thing.  They have you on a drip for a reason.  You shouldn’t fuck it up.”  By the look on Loki’s face Tony can tell he’s just dug his own grave and helpfully laid down in it.

“I want to make one thing clear to you, Tony,” Loki says in the way that someone asks if you have any last words, “We agreed that I owe you nothing.  You have not, nor will you ever, save me from anything.  You hold no claim or sway over my actions.”  The edge of the tape curls up as if to prove his point.

“Look I—”

“I want him removed!”  Tony flinches as Thor bursts into the room, pointing a beefy finger at him.  “Take him away from my brother!”  Behind him is an orderly packing more muscle than Tony thinks he can negotiate with.  He’s in the middle of standing and babbling and raising his hands in a totally non-threatening way when a cold voice cuts under Thor’s.

“I want him to stay.”

Tony sits back down, possibly out of pure shock.  Loki’s glaring daggers at Thor, who’s pulling his impression of a boulder again.

“He hurt you.”

“No, Thor.  He wants to protect me.”  The glare is briefly directed at Tony, who smiles weakly at it.  “As you wish to.  And since, despite your efforts, I am not comatose, I can choose who visits me.”

“I never wanted to—”

“Leave, Thor.”  The glare passes over the orderly, who nods and places a hand on Thor’s shoulder.  For a second, Thor looks like he’s going to break it off at the wrist, but then the fight goes out of him.  He sags visibly.

“If you say so.”  Then, turning surprisingly baleful eyes on Tony, he adds, “I will drop the charges against you.  Thank you for caring for my brother.”  He lets himself be ushered out of the room like a dog that’s been kicked in the nose for hogging a ball.

Tony can’t help but grin. When he looks back at the bed he finds Loki grinning back.

“Well done there, Ice Man,” Tony says.  

Loki raises an eyebrow. “Ice man?”

“Yeah.  You were all cool and sharp and—” Tony stops himself, butterflies jittering in his stomach.  He should probably be relieved that he won’t have to stand trial for assault but he keeps getting distracted by the little quirk of a smile at the edges of Loki’s mouth.  It flickers like a tiny, fragile insect, and Tony wants nothing more than to catch it and put it in a jar and tell it that it’s safe.  He stands before he realizes he’s done it, lets his feet carry him toward the bed.  Loki watches him approach, unmoving.  Tony feels oddly tall standing over him, oddly powerful.  This close, he can see the blotchiness of bruising around Loki’s temples and a crust of dried blood by the bandage.  He almost reaches out to wipe it away, but pushes his sleeves up to the elbows instead.  

“Shit,” Loki breathes.  He reaches out with one thin, pale hand and grabs Tony’s own, drawing his arm nearer.  Tony stops breathing, too focused on the cool slide of Loki’s fingers on his skin.  They trace lightly over the bruises, thin and delicate as bird bones on Tony’s injured flesh, then explore the scars on his forearm, the solder burns around his wrist, the veins that web out across his palm.  He tries his best to keep his hand pliant and limp.

“I was sure you’d be gone by the time I got to the bridge.”  His voice is rough but he decides he doesn’t care.  “That’s why I went.  I was sure you’d have—” he swallows “I was sure I’d be too late.”

Loki’s fingers curl around his, squeezing slightly.  There’s an earnestness in his face that Tony hasn’t seen before, an openness, and Tony decides if he could become an architect for Loki’s life he would build it so that Loki would have more cause to look like this.  He feels himself smiling, just a little.

“Thank you,” Loki says.

Tony runs his thumb over the back of Loki’s hand instead of answering.  Loki’s skin is smooth, bony, like alabaster or marble or old sea glass.  He pictures Loki, thrashed against the rocks until all the sharp edges of him are scratched and dulled, until his brilliance is made opaque by time and violence.  He thinks of force, of friction, of himself and his lab.  He sits on the edge of the bed and looks out the window at the light on the river, thinking how small it looks from here, how shallow.  He’s aware of Loki’s breathing next to him, of the way the mattress sags under Loki’s weight, pulling Tony in.  Loki’s hand worms out of his, running back up his arm to the bruises.

“Have you had these looked at?”

Tony chuckles; it hadn’t occurred to him that he might. “Nah.  I did more damage to myself last night than Thor did.”  Loki’s hand stills.

“How do you mean?”

Tony sucks in a breath, sure that this time he’s ruined it.  He stares down at the miracle of Loki’s hand on his arm, watching for the moment it goes away.  “I was pretty fucked up when I got to the bridge.  Drunk off my ass.  I—do that.  Sometimes.  It helps.”

“Does it?”

The question is so innocent, so empty of judgement, that Tony answers honestly.

“No.  It makes things worse, usually.  A lot worse.  But at some point worse drunk became easier than better sober, so.”  He shrugs tightly.  

“I used to pretend to be drunk to get out of things,” Loki says after a moment.  His hand works its way back down to Tony’s, playing with his fingers, exploring the rough edges of calluses.  “It’s quite a convenient excuse.  People stop expecting anything of you if they think you’re inebriated.” 

Tony snorts. “Not the people I know.  They just expect you to stop being drunk.”

Loki smiles wistfully, sighs.  “I always hated going to parties—they were boring and pompous and everyone spent the whole time pretending to fawn over each other—so I’d wait around for a couple of hours and then drink a glass or two of whatever was on hand.  Just enough that you could smell it on my breath.  I had the voice down cold, you know, you kind of—” his cadence slows “—slow down and start trying to o-ver-e-nun-see-ate because no matter what they say you’re Not Drunk—”  Tony’s just starting to laugh, but Loki swallows and shakes his head briskly and Tony stops.  “Anyway.  It worked well, all the times I tried it.”  His adams apple bobs sharply as he swallows.  Tony takes a breath, opens his mouth, stops himself.  

“What,” Loki asks.

“Nothing.”  Tony shrugs again.  Then, to fill the silence, “Could you fool Thor with that act?”

He’s rewarded with another little quirk of a smile.  “Oh yes.  I learned to throw my voice, too, and he always fell for that.  But I mainly used the drunk voice on my brother Baldr.”

“Your actual brother?”  Tony’s not going to make the same mistake twice.

Loki hesitates.  “Not by blood.  But he was better family to me than the rest of them.”

“Some brother,” Tony says because he always says too much, “Doesn’t even visit you in the hospital.”

In a flash Loki’s gone, arms crossed and face pointed at the window.  Dread drops cold in Tony’s stomach and he runs his hands—cold now, without Loki against them—over his face.

It takes him a few minutes to get the guts to break the silence.

“Sorry.  I’m an ass.”

The sharp line of Loki’s jaw twitches.

“Seriously though.  Freshman year of high school—I was what, thirteen?—and I won the state science fair.  You should have seen the amateurs I was up against, doing diet coke and mentos and baking soda volcanoes like those were actually impressive while I entered this robot that actually  _ worked,  _ you could control it by voice commands and everything.  And, you know, I was proud of myself.”

Loki’s shoulders jerk as he snorts.

“I got this medal for winning—cheap shit, plastic with like, nickel alloy on it or something—and I wore it around school the next day like I was a fucking peacock, strutting around, trying to get people to compliment me.  I was sure I’d at least score a date out of it.”

“Tell me your classmates weren’t that shallow.”  The comment’s directed at the wall but Tony can hear laughter in it.  His stomach loosens a little.

“Oh yeah,” he continues, “Nobody gave a shit about the stupid medal, or about me.  Except this one girl who, like, followed me into the bathroom.  I was in there fixing the medal—making sure it was the right way up so people could see it in all its shitty, cheap glory—and there she was.  Blonde, I think.  Skinny.”

Loki’s looking at him now, one eyebrow raised.  Tony nods.

“Right?  Anyway, she dragged me into a stall and sucked me off.  Bam.  And when she was done I asked her if it was because I’d won the science fair.  I was  _ convinced _ that was the coolest thing anyone could have ever done.  Wasn’t the reason, of course.  She just wanted to be the first one to fuck a future C.E.O.”  Loki goes still enough that Tony’s worried for a moment that he’s about to shatter.

“So I ditched the medal and bought some shades.  It was great.  I got laid all the time.”  He watches for any change in Loki’s face but doesn’t catch one.  In retrospect, it was probably a terrible idea to tell a BJ story out of nowhere to a guy who, in all honesty, he doesn’t actually know very well.  As in, at all, really. 

“Anyway that worked for awhile but at some point I—I dunno—grew up.  Or got weird.  I dated this girl for awhile, brilliant managerial econ major, bright red hair, and she was like the sun, you know.  She left a little while ago.  Graduated, moved away, got a job.  Said she had to get on with her life, quit waiting for me to get my shit together.  I was a wreck by that point anyway so I can’t blame her.  Not that I even deserved her in the first place.

“Anyway the point of this whole thing is that I’ve always been a dick and said stupid shit so…I dunno, forgive me?”

“Baldr had someone like that once.”  

“Yeah?”  Tony answers too quickly.  The heart monitor beeps on, stacking up intervals of silence—intervals that Tony’s been allowed to stay.  

“Her name was Nana.  I never knew her that well but they seemed suited for each other.  I think she did something environmental.”  Pale fingers skitter over the sheets, settling on the IV tape again.  Tony reaches out gently and removes Loki’s free hand, wrapping it in his.  He’s about to say something when his stomach speaks instead, grumbling.  He realizes he can’t remember the last time he ate a full meal.

“Shit, Loki, I need food.  I’m gonna go find the cafeteria.  Uh—you want me to bring you back anything?”  Loki smirks at him again and Tony almost forgets about food if it would mean he could stay here and be smirked at.

“I don’t think you’d make it through the door if you tried.  The staff is probably under orders to stop any food before it gets to me just in case I’ve asked anyone to slip me arsenic.”

“Right.”  Tony pats his hand awkwardly as he stands.  “Uh, see you later then.”  He waves, nods, and walks out.

It takes him longer than he wants to return: on his way back up he almost vomits twice out of nerves.  It’s a relief to find Loki alone and asleep, head lolling against the pillow and mouth dangling open.  Tony ventures up the the bed and presses the IV tape back in place on the back of his hand.  He holds on longer than he needs to, marveling at the warmth, the weight of Loki.  A pulse patters at his wrist; clipped fingernails rasp against Tony’s palm.  Loki is amazingly  _ alive _ , incomprehensibly  _ separate _ .

Tony leaves to let him rest.  Tucking his hands into his pockets, he wanders the halls, breathing antiseptic and mentally criticizing the ancient computers at the nurses’ stations.  His last visits to hospitals were wrapped up with death and terror and shame so dark he’s been sure he’ll never be able to visit a doctor again without panicking.  But now, somehow, it’s a relief to watch them stride through the wards, carrying responsibility he doesn’t have, doing a job he will never be asked to do.

He manages to catch a bus back to his apartment—blessedly empty and silent—and takes a glass of water with him onto the balcony.  The city flashes before him, the flickering of AC electricity the frantic tempo of every life that burns behind a lighted window.  He sits and watches the sky scrape itself free of clouds, the last of yesterday’s storm clearing off, and thinks about chirality, about reflection, about the way mirrors warp the light they turn away.


	2. Talk Therapy

DAY 6

Obie’s blueprints are sitting on the doorstep the next morning, packaged in a cardboard tube that Tony must have stepped over the night before.  He takes them with him to the lab, tosses them in the pile with the rest of the projects Obie’s sent him and tries his best to ignore them.  Eventually, spurred on by a flurry of texts asking for a list of materials and progress updates, he opens them.  He has to shove pieces of his dissertation off the bench so he can unfold them properly; they crash to the floor, probably denting in the process.  He kicks them into a pile with the pieces of a project he’d been collaborating with a colleague on and wonders how many emails the other guy has sent him asking how it’s going.

The plans are for a generator that looks a lot like a Tesla coil with the bottom chopped off.  Tony almost laughs—he can build Tesla coils in his sleep—but then he looks through the internal specs, the map of wire around many separate power cores that are themselves nuclear reactors splitting palladium.  The insulation mechanisms are mind-bending on their own.

Tony stares at the plans for awhile, mentally mapping his way through the device.  It should work, but it wouldn’t—couldn’t—be efficient the way it’s currently designed.  Tony pulls down a piece of tracing paper and an oil pencil.  He could keep the main body of the device, maintain the overall shape, but the core structure is ridiculously overcomplicated.  If he consolidates the cores and puts them in the middle, he could reroute the insulation to turn the heat into electricity, too.

He works for awhile, tinkering in theoretical space.  He fills page after page with scribbled calculations, sitting back each time only to scratch out what he’d written and start again.  Tension crawls up his arms, settles in his tendons.  He works through it, moving to the windows, painting out half-formed equations on the glass in dry-erase.  But the light fades before he can find a formula that works and he leaves the window half covered with marker like a tattered blackout curtain.  He works on the floor next, on great sheets of drafting paper that he steals from Hammer’s workstation.  They end up crumpled and stepped on, drips of coffee smudging the oil pencil.  

Sometime around two in the morning he starts pouring brandy into the coffee, convinced that if he only has a little it’ll quiet the frustration screaming in his temples.

It’s still dark when the fight goes out of him.  He stares blankly at the piles of paper around the lab, at the legions of his own broken thoughts staring back at him.  The idea he’s been chasing is liquid in his head, volatile.  He can’t touch it.  His hands are shaking when he brings them up to his face.

Paper crackles under his feet, rips.  He throws it against the windows in great, loosely-wadded balls.  It bounces back toward him and he dodges.  He doesn’t want to touch it.  He doesn’t want to see it.  Metal crunches as he steps on it; he hopes it flattens, hopes it breaks, hopes it becomes something he can never, ever fix.  He beats against the window, smudging variables onto his fists, and then he rubs them off, furious, like the ink might sink back into him if he leaves it for too long.  He jumps when his phone beeps—another text.  He flings it across the room.  It cracks against the wall.  A few seconds later it beeps again.  He leaves it to lie, unsure if he’s off to drown himself or wash his face in the bathroom sink.

Morning comes when he’s huddled in the back room, knees to his chest.  He has one hand on the futon, the other wrapped securely around his legs.  The door opens, slicing light across his face.  It hurts.

“Tony,”  It’s Hammer.  “What happened to the lab?  Are you OK, Tony?  Hey, man—“

“I’ll clean it up.”  Tony forces himself to stand.  “Sorry,” he says as he shoulders past Hammer, back into the lab, “I’ll clean it up.”

He takes an armload of scrapped calculations out to the dumpster and only barely stops himself from pitching in the original blueprints with them.  Instead, he rolls them back into their cardboard tube and shoves it under his desk.  He can feel the weight of it as he moves around the lab, washing down the windows and inspecting the damage he’d done to his other projects.  He writes an email to his collaborator explaining his lack of progress but can’t bring himself to send it.

Eventually, the sun drops low enough in the sky that Tony can justify leaving.  He waves off Hammer’s concerned offers to drive him home and takes a cab instead.  His entire body feels like lead, heavy and inert.  He can barely drag himself through the lobby.

There’s a note taped to his door, neatly folded graph paper.  “Couldn’t reach you at work so stopped by to check in.  The company misses you, Tony. Call me.”  From Obie.  

Obie’s enthusiastic when he answers Tony’s call.  “Tony!  I was getting worried about you.  How’re things?  Fine?”

“Yeah.”  Tony flops onto the couch, switches the call to speaker so he doesn’t have to press his phone’s broken screen against his face.

“Great.  That’s really great, Tony.  How do the blueprints look?  What can I send you?”

“The prints are fine.  I’m trying to make some improvements on them so it might take awhile to have a functional prototype—”

“That’s fine Tony, but I really need something to show the board by Friday.  I’ll send you some materials so you can fab something up fast.  Here, tell me what you need.”

Tony pinches the bridge of his nose, trying to recall anything on the original blueprints.

“Obie, look, the thing is meant to be like eighty feet in diameter, I can’t just shrink it on command.”

“So you’ll need some metal, then?  Plutonium, right?  That’s what the guys here were trying to use, but they couldn’t figure anything out.  You’ll get it though, won’t you Tony.”

“It’s palladium, Obie, and—”

“Palladium, that’s it.  Look, Tony, I got to go, but I’ll swing by on Friday to pick it up and we’ll go for a drink after, celebrate.  See you later, Tony.  Great to hear from you.”

The line goes dead.

Tony flicks through his list of recently used apps, trying to convince himself that Obie wouldn’t kill him if he didn’t have anything to show come Friday.  He stops at the maps application, thumbs it open.  The red line still connects him to Loki’s hospital, static and certain.  Tony taps the hospital’s phone number and asks to speak to a patient named Loki.  There’s a click as the call is transferred, the watery ringing of Loki’s room telephone.

“Hello?”

“Uh, hey Loki.  ’S Tony.”

“So the nurse said.”  Loki’s voice sounds thin and tight, maybe just because of the phone.

“How’s another day in paradise?” Tony asks.  There’s a long pause, full of wavering static that could either be breathing or a bad connection.

“My family visited today.”

“Oh,” Tony breathes.  He’s not sure if he’s up for this.  “How are you?”

“They want to take me home with them when I’m released.”  

“Your family.  Like Thor.  The guy who  _ whooped your ass and put you in the hospital _ .  Is that even legal?”

Loki’s voice is tired, slow.  “Thor no longer lives at home.  I will be under the care of Frigga and Odin, my adoptive parents.”

“Oh.”  Tony forces himself to take a deep breath.  “Well that’s good then.”

There’s a crackle of static that he interprets as a snort.  “Clearly you have never met Odin or Frigga.  I would rather—They’ll be looking after me for the foreseeable future.”

“What about your apartment?  Can’t you go back there?”

“No.  My lease expires at the end of the month and I’m under orders to be supervised.”

“Shit, Loki.”

“Be thankful for your freedoms, Tony.  I would rather I had no family to act like they care for me.”

Tony winces.  There’s silence for a moment, so he takes the opportunity to pad toward his bedroom.  He flips the phone to speaker and sets it on the dresser while he strips.  Loki speaks again as he’s pulling a fresh shirt over his head.

“But you called me for a reason, I presume, that doesn’t have to do with my family.  What is it?”

Tony yanks the shirt down and takes the phone.  “I, um, guess I got used to hearing from you,” he says lamely, crossing to the bed.  He’s tired enough that he thinks he could fall asleep just hitting the pillow, so he sits instead.  Loki’s not answering, so Tony lays back and stares at the ceiling.  He feels twelve again, like he’s back in the summer he and Rhodie had pretended they were superheroes in flashy armor flying around on missions to save the world.  They stayed up late into the night, pretending that phones were comms, telling each other about how many aliens they’d taken out with their suits’ shoulder missiles.

“Tony?”  Loki asks after awhile.

“I’m here.”  He scrubs at his eyes, trying to force them to stay open.  Grainy nebulas swim between him and the ceiling.

“Why did you call?”

Tony sighs, feeling his whole body deflate.  “You’re not gonna let me off of this one, are you?”

“Don’t answer a question with a question.”  Loki’s chiding him too good-naturedly to be taken seriously.

“Why not?”

“You’re not very good at being subtle.”

“Why would I want to be?”

“Answer the question, Tony.”  He can hear the smirk in Loki’s voice, pictures it fluttering over his face.  

“What if I said it was to hear your beautiful voice?”

“I’d know you were lying.”

Tony gasps in mock outrage.  “There’s no way you could know I was lying!”

“I always know when people lie.”

“Me too.”

“What?”

“You lied just then.”

“No I didn’t.”

“You did.  And there you went again.”

“Tony, you’re mistaken.  I am the Liesmith.  You can’t outlie the liesmith.”

Tony laughs, rolling over onto his stomach and resting his head on a folded arm.  “I can too.”

Loki snorts.  “I’d like to see you try.”

“I’m doing it right now.”

“That was far too obvious.  No points.”

“No, no, let me finish.  You’re still in that hospital bed, right?”

There’s a brief pause.  “Yes.”

“Well I’m in an actual bed.  Without any pillows.  I am so beating you at lying right now.”

“Cheap tricks will get you nowhere, Tony.”

Tony yawns instead of answering, nuzzles his face against the sheets.  The whole world seems, for the moment, to be soft and warm, small enough to fit between his ear and Loki’s.  “Hey Loki?”

“Are you conceding victory to me?”

“Nah.  I’m tired as hell though.  Didn’t sleep last night.” There’s a pause. “Would it be cool if I visited tomorrow?”

“Of course.”  The answer sounds startled out of him.  “But you should bring a game or something; there’s only so long I can watch infomercials before I become homicidal.”

“They don’t even let you have, like, HBO?  Damn.”

“Hospitals try to keep patients away from material that would, shall we say, artificially elevate their heart rates.”

Tony snorts into his pillow.  “That’s gotta be at least two levels of voyeurism.  Not even I’ve done anything that kinky.”

“Are you going to worm your sex life into every conversation we have?”

“Only if it’s relevant.”

“Is there a time when you believe it is not relevant?”

“Yes.”

“What time is that?”

Tony lets the silence stretch out, wondering how long it’ll take Loki to crack.

“As I thought.”

“So I’ll see you tomorrow?”  Tony asks because it’s probably late and he definitely is not going to fall asleep on the line.  He did that a couple of times while he was with Pepper and she’d called it cute before she’d called it being a bad boyfriend.

“See you tomorrow, Tony.”

Tony hangs up, drags himself over to turn out the light.  He falls asleep remembering the feeling of bone-white fingers on his wrist.

#

DAY 8

Loki’s windowsill is already crowded with bouquets when Tony arrives, but he tosses his armload of game boxes on the chair and hands over his vase anyway.  Loki takes it with a raised eyebrow, turning the vase around and around before shoving the other flowers aside to place it nearest the head of the bed.  “Cala lillies?” he asks as he does so. “You know they symbolize death.”

Tony shoves his hands into his pockets, feels his stomach drop.  “I didn’t, actually.  But I thought they looked nice.  You know, pale.  Like you are.”

“I suppose I should take it as a compliment that you think I look like a corpse, given our history.  Thank you, Tony.”  He pats the edge of his bed and Tony sits, smiles.

“Welcome.”

Loki looks better today: his head is no longer wrapped in gauze and the IV is out of his arm.  His eyes are bright and there’s a little color in his cheeks.  He turns his head to look at the flowers and Tony catches a glimpse of a bright halo of shaved skin at the back of his head; it frames a line of stitches a few inches long.  Tony’s breath catches in his throat and he can tell Loki hears by the long, level look he gives him.  But Loki nods at the games on the chair.

“What did you bring?”  he asks neutrally.

Tony gets up and grabs them, bringing the whole stack over so Loki can peruse them.  Some of the boxes are old and worn, copies Tony had grown up with and brought to college in the hopes of playing at four in the morning over Solo cups of rum and bags of Cheetos.  Others are new, picked up at a toy store downtown, still shrink-wrapped in cellophane.

Loki selects Scrabble to start with.  “Grab the tray?” he requests, pointing.  Tony does, setting the phone and the TV remote on the windowsill by the flowers so Loki can spread out the game board.  He makes to drag the chair over but Loki shakes his head at him, patting the bedspread again.  Tony settles himself down next to Loki’s legs, feeling the insane urge to grab Loki’s hand as he reaches from bed to tray to set out the letter racks.  He settles for smiling instead, making sure Loki sees it.

“You seem well-rested,” Loki comments, offering Tony the bag of letters.  Tony reaches in, feeling as much for the curve of Loki’s fingers as for tiles, and shrugs.

“I slept last night, if that’s what you mean.  It’s amazing what obeying the basic rules of biology can do for you.”

“About as much good as being caged up like a zoo animal does against you,” Loki replies.  He selects his own letters and arranges them carefully on his tray.  Tony makes a face that he means to be sympathetic.

“When do you get out, anyway?”

“The end of the week, I think.  Not that that will be any better: the zoo animal released into the wild without any way to defend itself.”  He picks a single tile out of the bag. “A,” he says, showing Tony, “I go first.  Unless you want to draw and see if you tie.”

Tony gestures at the board.  “The floor is yours.”

Loki’s fingers hover over his tiles for a moment before he begins to lay them out.  G-U-A-R-D.

Tony considers his own tiles and plays “duel”.  

“Is that the best you can do?”  Loki asks, eyebrows raised.  “This will be easier than I thought.”  Tony just grins in return and reaches for more letters.  He lets a few turns pass before he asks the question that’s burning at the back of his lips.

“So what’s so bad about going home with your parents?”  Loki glances up, having just played “xi” in two directions on a double word score.  Tony puts his hands up placatingly as a precaution, but Loki just sighs and twists his hands in his lap.  The paper hospital admission bracelet crinkles against his wrist.

“Imagine you’re in a war,” he says, “Maybe the Vietnam war.  There are lots of folk songs about it.  You’re marching through the forest with your general behind you—that’s Odin—and he won’t let you stop marching no matter what.  You’ve been going for hours and the ground is hard under you, when suddenly it gets softer.  You like that for a moment, it’s easier to walk on after all, but it turns out it gives way too easily and it’s a swamp and you get stuck in it because it won’t support you the right way.  That’s Frigga.”  Loki nods at the board.  “Your move.”

Tony, realizing he’s been staring at Loki, hastily places “shoe”.  It’s not the best move he could have made, but he doesn’t care.  Loki snorts and plays “aborting” on an unrelated area of the board, emptying his letter rack.  Tony sticks his tongue out and Loki laughs.  

In the end, Loki beats Tony by thirty points and, as a concession, asks Tony to pick the next game.  Tony pulls out the chess set he’s had since he was eight and starts setting up the pieces.  Loki beats him at that, too—“I was in the chess club in middle school,” he explains sheepishly after taking Tony’s queen in the first ten moves—and asks if they can play Risk next.

At some point, a nurse comes in with a tray of food.  Tony carefully transfers the game board to the chair so Loki can eat, then stands awkwardly, picking at the flowers, until the nurse has taken Loki’s vitals and left.  The other bouquets are mixed: bright flowers that look like huge dandelions interspersed with tiny white blooms and a variety of greens.  The petals come loose in Tony’s hand and he pulls away, not wanting to ruin them.

“That looks disgusting,” he comments, gesturing to Loki’s lunch.  It’s a sandwich of thin, dense bread and what looks like some approximation of tuna inside it, accompanied by a plastic cup of chopped peaches.  Loki grunts an affirmative and bites into the sandwich.

“It’s surprisingly edible,” he says around his mouthful.  “Do you want the fruit?”

Tony shrugs. “Sure, if you don’t want it.”

“Too sweet.”

About halfway through their third game of Risk—Tony won the first game; Loki demanded a rematch and won the second one; Tony demanded a rematch and is on his way to winning the third—an orderly comes in to kick Tony out.  

“Leave the games, please,” Loki says.  Tony shrugs, tossing pieces back into the box.  

“Not like I’m going to play them at home.  I’ve got robots that could play with me if I wanted, but once you’ve taught them to beat the grand masters at chess it’s not very fun anymore.”

“I can see there being something inherently demoralizing about being beaten by a machine you built yourself.”  Loki’s hand brushes Tony as he helps close the box.  “Will you come back and finish this one?”

Tony thinks his face cracks in half with how hard he smiles.  “Whenever you want your ass whooped at Risk, just let me know.”

The orderly returns, rapping impatiently on the doorframe.

“Goodbye, Tony,” Loki says.  “I’ll see you later.”

#

DAYS 9-11

Over the next two days, Tony beats Loki at Risk seven more times.  Loki continues to wipe the floor with him in chess and Scrabble; they’re evenly matched in Axis and Allies, but mutually decide it takes too long to set up.  Tony stays at the hospital as long as he can, dawdling in the cafeteria and gift shop even after he’s been kicked out of Loki’s room.  His phone buzzes with Obie’s calls and he almost throws it in the toilet, but in the end settles for keeping it turned off.  He drags himself to campus on the second morning because Loki tells him that his parents are coming to visit and that Tony shouldn’t be there; Tony spends almost the whole time looking at the map from his apartment to the hospital.  If he thinks this is absolutely ridiculous behavior, that he’s gotten weirdly obsessive over Loki, he tells himself that at least this obsession isn’t actively rotting his liver from the inside out or otherwise putting him in immediate physical harm.

Around eleven, he gets a call from his PI reminding him that he’s supposed to be in the office for a meeting.  Tony dawdles over buying coffee for as long as he can before showing up, fully aware he should have a prototype with him, or at least a report on what he’s done the past two weeks.  Lacking both, he sits in front of his PI’s impressively tacky desk and tries to crawl inside himself.  He manages to sit through almost an hour of verbal lashing before he actually feels like he might vomit all over the desk, the floor, and the professor; he bolts from the room, ignoring his PI’s outraged shouts, and makes it to the bathroom in time to splutter up the coffee.  He hangs off the sink, head resting against the cool porcelain, and takes out his phone.  The line to Loki is still there, still solid.  He shuts his eyes and breathes, waiting for enough time to pass so he can get on a train.

 

On the third day, Tony stops by the hospital early, before Loki’s parents come to pick him up.  He arrives to find Loki dressed in a sweater and jeans, looking so normal, so much a part of the rest of the world that Tony stops short and just stares.  The sadness is settled again on Loki’s shoulders and Tony wonders if it’s woven into the fabric of his clothes like thread spun from filaments of lead.  

Loki’s hands shake when he hands Tony his games.  Tony takes them and sets them on the chair, wanting his hands free.  He’s not sure what he’ll need them for but it seems important.  There’s an interminable moment of silence, thick, like something is being built between them.  Tony desperately wants to stop it, and maybe that’s the weight on Loki too, the feeling of all the minutes beyond this, once Loki is gone back to his life and Tony’s has shrunk again to the confines of his lab and his head, which seems at once too small and too vast to navigate.

“Can I see your phone?” Loki asks.

Tony pulls it out and turns it on, waits for the missed call count to update before passing it over.  Loki taps away for a moment before handing it back.  Tony pockets it without looking at what Loki did because looking would mean he wasn’t looking at Loki, wasn’t watching the way his expression flickers beneath his composure like a lake; wasn’t watching how it crumpled when the orderly told him his parents were there like a mine had gone off.

“I’d better go,” Tony says because it’s true but he doesn’t want it to be.  He wants to ask Loki what he’s supposed to do now, how he’s supposed to spend his nights if he can’t go to the bridge, how he’s supposed to spend his days if he can’t come here.  He wants to ask Loki how Loki got permission to fuck up Tony’s life like that.  “I’ll see you,” he adds fiercely.  He wants to shake Loki by the shoulders and make him understand.  

“Goodbye, Tony,”  Loki replies, squaring his shoulders.  He grabs the vase of Calla lilies and edges around Tony and out the door.  Tony watches the scar on the back of his head as he walks away and he thinks about symmetry and probability and the three dimensions of time.

His physics teacher in high school had explained it as an ant crawling down a wire.  The wire itself is the first dimension of time, like any other axis on a graph.  But the ant is also rotating, circling the wire, so that there are two dimensions to its movement that are separate entirely from its progress down the wire.  So if you’re looking from one side of the wire, it looks like the ant pops into and out of existence periodically, but to the ant it’s all continuous, all circular; and since the wire is homogenous in character it probably doesn’t notice that it’s getting anywhere at all.

#

DAY 11: PART 2

Obie’s waiting in the lab when Tony gets there, looking like a black hole in his suit.  Tony navigates as far as he can around Obie’s gravity well and pulls out the blueprints, ignoring Obie’s “Hey, Tony,” in favor of pretending vehemently that this is not actually happening.  He spreads them on the bench and lets go, letting them snap closed.  

“How’s it going, Tony?”  Obie asks, and he’s there, less than three feet away, leaning over the bench and into Tony’s space.  All the air seems to have solidified in Tony’s lungs.  He jerks his head at the blueprints, hoping it will make Obie look away.

“You got a prototype for me?”

Tony jerks away from the desk.  He picks his way across the lab in silence, shooting a glare at Hammer, who’s scrunched behind a robot chassis and holding up a power drill that isn’t even plugged in.  Tony starts making coffee and addresses everything to the beans.  “Not yet.  I told you—there are too many problems with the design.  The core redundancy looks nice on paper, but it will never be efficient to build.  Like, you can’t build it in a week with a gun to your head kind of inefficient.”  The coffeemaker gurgles to life; Tony grabs a sopping, moldy sponge out of the sink and starts wiping down the counter.  “I’ve started sketching out a version with a consolidated core, but it requires massive rewiring of the storage and dampening systems.”  He wrings out the sponge; it leaves black blobs clinging to his skin.  He tries not to think about the way bodies bloat under water, how they become substrates.  He rinses his hands in the sink, watching how the blobs catch on the metal.  “Not to mention,” he adds over the hiss of the water, “That building a miniaturized nuclear containment system is fucking difficult, not to mention nine of them like Howard wanted.”

“The board’s not going to be happy about this, Tony.”  Tony mouths the words along with Obie.  He kind of wants to punch him in the face.  It’s a new feeling, this anger coiled hot and tight at his shoulders.  Obie’s steps are loud, ringing like clock bells or bombs going off a mile away.  An arm descends around Tony’s shoulders and he feels the weight of the whole building settle there.

“I’m going to fix this, Tony,” Obie says, right in his ear.  Tony can feel the heat of his breath against his face.  He struggles to keep his fists clenched, his shoulders straight.  “I’m going to help fix you.”

A hand whacks him hard across the back, enough to make him stagger forward and catch himself on the sink.  The water’s still running, filling up the basin a little; clots of mold spin lazily in the eddies.  Tony wonders, if he were to vomit, what exactly it would look like.

“But for now,” Obie continues, and thank God he takes his hands away, “Let’s go get a drink.  My treat.  You look like you’ve had a tough week.”

A couple deep breaths and he feels kind of OK again, less like Obie’s cracked him open and left little bits to float untethered around the lab.  Tony turns off the water and chucks the sponge back into the basin of the sink.  He doesn’t have to go out with Obie.  He could say he has too much work to do.  He could slip away before they reach the parking lot, stopping at the bathroom or diving into another building.  If worst comes to worst, he could run.

But Obie’s holding the door to the lab open for him and then he’s following Tony out of the building and Tony doesn’t want to do anything else that might get him in trouble.

 

He lets Obie take him to a bar in the nice part of town, with gilt ceilings and a grand piano in the corner, played by a guy in a tailcoat whose torso undulates with the music like he’s caught in a dramatically rough ocean.  Tony considers it a little grandiose, considering that the music that he’s playing sounds like something Tony’s heard in the waiting room of a dentist’s office.

Obie herds him up to the bar, which is so highly polished that Tony can’t quite tell what color the wood is.  He orders a whiskey when Obie leans in at him, tosses it back immediately and orders another.  There’s a plush barstool next to him but he doesn’t sit.  Warm light glints off glass and crystal and Tony has to squint against it.  He ends up looking into the mirror behind the bar long enough to figure that he looks like complete and utter shit before he looks away.

“Have you heard from Pepper lately?” Obie asks.  Tony starts, sloshing whiskey out of his glass.

“Not anything new,” he grouses, then swallows his shot.  The bartender pours him a new one without him even having to ask.  It’s good whiskey, Tony thinks as the burn fades down his throat.  Shame he’s not trying to taste it.

Obie has a colorful cocktail in front of him with a crisp paper umbrella sticking out of it.  He sloshes it around delicately before slurping at it. “You should try talking to her, Tony.  Try to get her back.”

“That’s ridiculous.  Completely ridiculous.”  Shot three down; Tony has to motion to the bartender for shot four.  Probably a sign he should slow down a little.  “She doesn’t want to hear from me, Obie.  Ever.”

Obie laughs, a sound so deep Tony can feel it through the bar.  It sounds like something you’d hear out of a terrible horror movie before the earth opened up underneath you and swallowed you whole.  “Not for you, Tony.  For the company!  I miss having her around the place.”  Tony swipes his finger around the edge of his glass, watching as his reflection smears.  The pianist has stopped playing momentarily and it strikes him how quiet the place is.  The sound of Obie slurping down more of his cocktail is the loudest thing in the entire bar.

A girl sidles up on Tony’s right with quick, mincing steps.  She’s tall, thin, wrapped in sequins.  He doesn’t miss the way she leans over the barstool to order or the shift of her skirt up her thigh when she sits down next to him.  He scoots away a little, smiling politely.

“Pepper’s great at running projects, you know.  Really competent.  I bet she could take over administration of Stark Industries within a month of being hired.  Don’t you think, Tony?”

Tony grunts, sipping sullenly on his shot.  This close, the whiskey isn’t as good as he thought it was.  He realizes Obie expects an answer. “It doesn’t matter, Obie.  She’s not coming back.”  Obie claps a hand around his shoulder, drawing him in.  Tony glances fleetingly at the girl like she might help rescue him, but ends up looking at the back of her head.  Her dress has a very, very low back.

Obie smells sour, like alcohol and bleach.  He’s right up against Tony’s face again; if he looks close enough, Tony thinks he’d be able to see straight into Obie’s skull.  He clutches his whiskey like the teddy bear a child takes to defend them from a nightmare.  “Now Tony, I know things didn’t end well between you and Pepper.”  Tony turns his head as far away as he can, trying to remember to breathe.  “But I think contacting her is something you can do for the good of the company.”  Somehow, Obie shifts his arm to draw Tony even closer against him.  “Besides, it’ll be good for you, huh?  Give you a sense of closure about the whole thing.  And it’d be great to have her back.  I think she’d really give a spark to the senior management.”  He claps Tony’s shoulder, holding on tight enough to be painful, and leans back toward his drink.  “Think about it anyway, will ya?”

“Sure, Obie.”

Tony slugs back his shot, coughs, and ducks away.

 

The men’s bathroom ends up being behind the piano, so Tony’s serenaded by loud, plinking elevator music as he collapses onto a toilet seat and rubs his hands over his face.  His phone digs into his thigh so he pulls it out of his pocket and turns it over in his hands, feeling its weight.  He clicks the screen on and thumbs around his apps for awhile, killing time and trying to get his breathing under control.  The tips of his fingers are starting to feel a little fuzzy so the drinks must be kicking in.  

Recalling that Loki had done something to his phone, he checks his recently used apps and sees an outgoing text message.  “Tony,” it reads; the number isn’t familiar but it has a Boston area code.  Tony stares at it for a moment, types a message.  Deletes it.  Types another one.  Deletes it.

“ _ Hey _ ,” he finally sends and shoves his phone back in his pocket before it can buzz with a response.  

He forces himself out of the stall on the principle that even Obie would be an acceptable distraction.  It’s by sheer act of will that he doesn’t walk back out with his hands in his pockets to better feel if his phone goes off.

It doesn’t.  Not when he gets back to the bar and finds Obie holding out another shot to him.  Not an hour later when he’s starting to have to be careful of how he raises his glass, lest he miss his mouth and slosh liquor over himself and Obie, who seems to have become permanently and oppressively attached to Tony’s shoulders.  Not half an hour after that when the girl in the sequined dress comes back and Tony buys her a drink.

“Want to get out of here?” he asks her.

By the time she’s got her arm wrapped around Tony’s back and is practically dragging him out of the bar, Tony doesn’t even remember that he’s waiting for a response.  She pours herself into a cab and tugs Tony after her.  He gives the cabbie the address of a hotel nearby and lets her undo the first couple buttons of his shirt.  “What’s the great Tony Stark doing in Boston?” she purrs, sliding a finger down his neck.  

“You, apparently,” he replies, and kisses her.  The back of the cab smells like cigarettes and spearmint air freshener; the girl tastes like gin and toothpaste, but she moans into his mouth so he reaches up and tangles his fingers in her hair.

The hotel takes his card and trades him a room on the top floor, which he occupies for an hour before slinking back out, shirt untucked and tripping over his shoelaces.  The girl is in the shower soaking the smell of Tony off her skin.  He checks his phone on the way down the elevator.

“ _ Hello Tony _ .”

It takes him a minute to remember how to breathe.

“ _ How’re things? _ ” he types hurriedly, allowing Autocorrect to write over his mistakes.  The elevator dings; he steps out into a lobby decorated with dark leather sofas and large, colorful abstract oil paintings.  His phone buzzes in his hand again before he gets outside.

“ _ After a day in the field the released animal flounders toward the oasis, pursued by predators from all sides. _ ”

Tony steps into the night, hunching his shoulders against the cold.  The reflected light of streetlamps is smeared across the sidewalk next to cigarette butts and windblown receipts.  Tony picks a direction and starts walking, typing as he goes.

“ _ You should go all attack zebra on them next time _ .”  His fingers are getting cold so he stuffs them into his jacket pockets, shivering as the cold soaks through to his stomach.  After a minute his phone buzzes.

“ _ Excuse me? _ ”

Tony grins and thumbs at the screen.  “ _ Attack zebra.  There’s this great video on the internet of this zebra chasing down a cheetah.  Don’t fuck with zebras, man. _ ”

“ _ I was unaware of such equine badassery _ ,” Loki replies.  Tony snorts.  He tries to pull up his coat collar, fumbles with it, gives up.  In front of him, cars line up at a stoplight, puffing breaths of exhaust into the air.

“ _ It’s great outside _ ,” he types, because it is and he hasn’t been out on a night without Loki in it for what feels like forever.

“ _ Unfortunately I am unable to enjoy such base pleasures without an escort.” _

The light turns green and Tony totters across the street.  His phone buzzes.  “ _ Please describe it. _ ”

Tony sits down on a fire hydrant to reply, shaking his hands out to keep them warm enough to type.  “ _ It’s cold as fuck _ ”—he thinks back an hour—“ _ That doesnt make any sense. But its cold. And kind of wet. But not raining wet, just post-sprinkler wet. Makes the pavement smell good. _ ”  A taxi pulls up to the curb beside him, rolling along as slow as it can without stopping.  He waves it away and watches as it speeds across a few empty lanes to turn left at the next corner.  “ _ I have no idea where I am _ ,” he tells Loki.  The hotel is a few blocks behind him, the orderly lines of the financial district ahead, but he only knows that because of the buildings sided with dark glass that reflects the lit-up letters of bank names.  Every now and again there’s a dip in the skyline, some old building in stone or brick, a skeleton the city has outgrown.  He doesn’t tell Loki this, partly because he’s stuffed his fingers in his pockets again and doesn’t want to take them out and partly because it’s too cheesy to type.

_ “Welcome to the human condition,”  _ Loki says from his phone screen,  “ _ Please enjoy your stay.” _

_ “The customer service is lousy. I want a refund.” _

_ “Unfortunately you have signed up for the basic package, which does not come with a warranty or a return policy.  Your only option would be to cut off service.”  _ Tony snorts again and stands; the fire hydrant is slippery and there’s something in his bones that wants to move, wants to get lost.  He starts walking again, turns right at the corner, turns left after that.  He doesn’t look at the street signs; he doesn’t want to be able to triangulate himself between his lab and Obie, between himself and his apartment.  If he knew where Loki was he might be interested in figuring out the intervening distance, but as it is the shortest path between points A and B is a plastic-and-silicone prism in his pocket.  As if on cue, it vibrates.  “ _ Tell me something else. _ ”

Tony’s breath hangs in the air, a pale fog between him and the screen.  He knows he’s going to say something about Pepper; now he considers it, he knows she’s been following him since Obie mentioned her at the bar.  The girl had been too short and her skin too dark, but the line of her jaw had been familiar when he sucked along it and her fingers were almost as fine-boned.  The moment that stop lights blinked from yellow to red was like blinking while looking at Pepper’s hair, lit up by the sun.  And as much as he’s avoiding streets he knows because of their relationship to his lab, he’s also avoiding them so he won’t run into ghosts of him and Pepper holding hands, passing a large coffee back and forth, her tugging his scarf back to center on his neck.

“ _ That manecon girl I told you about? I met her in California.”  _ He dithers for a minute, trying to think of what to add.  Sends it as is.

Loki responds immediately.   _ “Why were you in CA?” _

_ “Broadly, I was doing undergrad at caltech. Specifically socal has nice beaches and it was spring break.” _

_ “Go on.” _

_ “I had this group of friends in high school and we all ended up doing undergrad in socal, so we hung out a lot in college. My friend Natasha was at ucla for international relations and her boyfriend convinced her to host a party for spring break since she had this really nice beachfront apartment. She’s scary as shit so I dont know how he managed to talk her into it unless she wanted to do it the whole time anyway. _

_ “So we all go, its a good party with shitty booze but lots of people.  The apartment is big but not palacial so everyone kind of notices that theres this door that stays shut all the time.  Tasha says thats her roommates room and nobody should go in it and when Tasha tells you to do something you do it. Shes probably killed people that pissed her off before. _

_ “At one point the door opens. I was standing by it I forget why but this chick comes out and Im pretty sure shes the hottest thing on two legs. She looked like you could snap her in half with a stick but the way she walked was like she saw you with your stick and would have it out of your hands before you could touch her. Not like Tasha, whod then kick your teeth in. More like shed break it into little pieces and then smile at you so youd never want to do it again.  _

_ “I tried to talk to her but she wasnt having any of it. She had work to do she said and went back in her room” _

He gets two texts from Loki in quick succession:  _ “You are a total asshole fratboy”  _ and “ _ That’s not the end of the story”. _

_ “Its not I guess but from there it gets romantic comedy boring. I made an ass of myself for awhile, hung around Tashas a lot trying to get Pepper to talk to me but she was adament until her finals were over and then she started hanging out with us. Eventually we got together over chinese takeout at my place.” _

Tony’s feet are starting to hurt, warmth blooming on the balls of his feet from too much friction.  He swipes into Google Maps, gets directions to his apartment.  Finds it’s not too far to walk so changes course accordingly.

_ “Truly you are a Cassanova, an Eros,”  _ Loki says, the message scrolling through the bar at the top of Tony’s screen.  He thumbs back to the messaging app.

_ “Cant I be Zeus instead? Zeus is badass.” _

_ “Apologies, but Zeus is already taken by Thor. You’re not enough of a loudmouth anyway.  Apollo may suit you better.” _

_ “Whatd he do?”    _ Tony has vague memories of being read a brightly illustrated children’s book of Greek myths by his mother, but he remembers the thin bones of her legs under him, the trill of her voice, the way she smelled of disinfectant and flour better than he recalls the stories.

_ “Was analytical, made art, threw discs with strapping young men with thinly veiled homoerotic subtext and sexually assaulted a girl until she turned into a tree” _

_ “What a flattering comparison” _

_ “Alternatively I could offer you Hephaestus.  Deformed and ostracised, he runs a smithy and makes the armor of the Gods” _

_ “And that ones scarily accurate” _

_ “I hereby christen you Hephaestus” _

“ _ Thanks. What Greek god are you then?” _

He doesn’t hear back: not when he checks his phone for directions three more times; not when he finally spots his building on the skyline; not when he strides through the lobby, squinting against the brightness of the lights; not when he folds his coat over the couch and flops down with his tablet, streaming some terrible procedural crime drama just so there are other voices in the room.

#

DAYS 12-15

Tony doesn’t hear from Loki for four days.  He spends the first three in his apartment alternating between lying on the bed and on the couch.  Sometime during the third night the loneliness opens up wide in his chest and he crawls out to the nearest liquor store, returning with a handle of Jack Daniels that’s more empty than it should be by the time he gets back home.  He takes some with him to campus the next day in an opaque plastic water bottle.  Hammer warbles something about Tony being gone the day before; he barks back that he was sick and he can tell by the way Hammer nods that he must look shitty enough to be convincing.  He goes home after half a day by a different train just to have something to do.

He can see the bags under his eyes reflected dully in the smudged plexiglas of the train window.  They make him look like a raccoon, like he got in a fight, like a druggie.  Which, he supposes, tilting his water bottle back for the final swig, he kind of is.  He remembers hearing once that every culture known to man OK’s a set of intoxicants for common use.  Except this one tribe of Eskimos, way up in Alaska or somewhere.  He wonders what their secret was, whether living constantly in the cold gave them a kind of fortitude; or if being on the verge of death most of the time, coupled with the opportunity to go outside whenever and see a spectacular light show only rivaled by really good hallucinogens, meant that they didn’t need anything else to make their reality seem unreal.  

He remembers, as he steps off the train and starts walking the ten blocks to his building, that the White Man had given them alcohol in exchange for seal fur, and that after that they’d drunk themselves right out of the history books.

“Fucking Russians,” he mutters to himself, and watches as a girl stepping onto the train shoots him a glare.

It’s warmed up a little in the past few days, surprising for this late in December.  Tubes of neon contorted into reindeer with massive, rounded heads wink at him from storefronts, dim against the sunlight.  Fake pine trees sag with thick ribbon and opalescent spheres in red and gold and silver from every bank lobby.  It feels surprisingly good to be moving.  Each step is a moment, a capsule of time he can package between his feet and place behind him.  He wonders suddenly how thick the air in cities must get, stacked high with millions of people’s moments.

He slides into a Dunkin Donuts, orders a large coffee.  It comes too quickly, in a thin Styrofoam cup, so he leans on the outside wall of the shop to sip at it, determined to take as long as he possibly can to drink it.

When his phone rings, it sounds like the closest thing to a choir of angels that Tony’s ever heard.

“Hello,” he says, not looking at who’s calling.  It hits him that this may be a bad idea, but he decides he’d rather take an irate Obie than another day of nebulous, hourless silence.

“Tony?”

“Loki!” There’s staticky traffic behind Loki’s voice, the distant, pixelated sound of a blaring horn.  “Where are you?”

“Therapist’s.”  Loki spits the word, sighs in a rush of white noise.  “It’s about the only place I can go by myself, honestly.  Though I had to convince Thor not to sit in the waiting room the entire time like a nervous parent.”

Tony has a hard time imagining big, brawny Thor curled in a wooden chair under warm lamps, reading an old tabloid while classical music pipes softly from placeless speakers.  He tries anyway. 

“I was wondering if you could help me with something.”  Loki sounds soft, suddenly nervous.  Tony feels his pulse jump up a few beats per minute.

“Of course.”  He may have answered too quickly.

“Good.  Good.  Um, meet me at City Hall?”

“The what?”  Tony slurps at his coffee, realizing that it’s essentially overpriced hot water.

“City Hall.  By the Holocaust Memorial?  And the Federal Building.”

“I’ll Google it.  See you soon.” 

He holds the phone to his ear until Loki disconnects.

 

City Hall is packaged in a harshly geometric concrete-and-brick obelisk at one edge of an expansive, angled brick courtyard.  Tony doesn’t see Loki outside, nor had he seen him on the bus or on the sidewalk outside Dunkin Donuts.  A not insignificant part of Tony had apparently expected hearing his voice to summon him physically, and even now he feels himself looking around with more alertness than he can ascribe to a caffeine rush.

The low stone steps up to the building are dotted with people hunched under black woolen overcoats, as alike in posture and silhouette as the pigeons that pick for crumbs around their feet.  And then he sees him—taller and thinner than most of the others, hands stuffed in his pockets, face paler than the stone.  He looks even thinner than Tony remembers him, though that might just be because the background is bigger.  Tony feels himself smiling, hopes in some abstract way that it will shrink the bags under his eyes, make him look less abused.

“What happened to you?” Loki asks as soon as he’s close enough.  

“I fell into a whiskey bottle and couldn’t get out,” Tony says, trying to sound like he’s joking.

Loki chews at his bottom lip, a habit Tony doesn’t remember him having, and replies, “You shouldn’t drink.”

Tony lets himself roll his eyes.  “Thanks, Mom.  So why are we here?  What does a City Hall actually do?”

Loki stares at him, wide-eyed and serious.  “It’s a hall filled with a working model of the city in miniature.  And it records everything that happens.  The building.  It’s sentient, you know.  It takes down all the details of everyone’s lives in the city with a billion pens and stacks them in boxes.”

“Bullshit.”  Tony’s life would probably be full of empty pages with the occasional angry and directionless spill of ink.

“Sadly, you’re right.”  Loki’s fingers bulge his pockets out, wrapping around something.  A phone?  A slip of paper?  “But they do hold records of people’s lives.  Marriage certificates, death certificates, name changes,” he pauses, “I’m looking for a very specific set of papers at the prompting of my therapist.  He thinks they might help me,” he withdraws one hand from its pocket, crooks his fingers in elegant air quotes, “Find closure.”

“Do you think it’ll help?”

The architecture of Loki’s expression sags as if it’s lost a piece of foundation.  “I don’t know.”  Tony nods, waits for Loki to piece his composure back together, and follows him up the steps.

They pass beneath thick concrete scaffolding into an interior courtyard tiled with sunlight.  Beyond is the lobby, echoing full of footsteps.  They find a map on the wall with a bright red star over the lobby.  Loki puts a finger over the Registry Division, mouths the floor and room numbers.  Tony follows him up a wide, brick escalator.  

The registry department is built of out-of-the-box plastic countertops with dark grey carpeting up the sides, like the tellers’ bench of an especially cheap bank.  Loki walks up to an open window, gesturing for Tony to follow him.  There’s a middle-aged lady behind it, glasses perched on her nose as she peers over them at a CRT monitor that couldn’t possibly have been purchased after 1995.  Loki clears his throat softly, twice.

“Hello sir.”  The lady—Grace, Tony reads on her nametag—has a thick local accent.  “What can I help you with?”

“Um,” Loki’s voice is quiet, unsure.  Tony squeezes his arm, not sure why he feels this is the right thing to do.  “I’d like to get a…a birth certificate.”

“Were the parents married at the time of birth?”

Loki gulps, licks his lips.  “I—I don’t know.”

“In that case,” Grace says with a practiced gentleness, “We can only release the certificate to someone whose name is on it.”  She raises her eyebrows at them, waiting for an answer.  She’s wearing a sparkly pink lipstick that reminds Tony of the girl who’d saved him from Obie at the bar.  He doesn’t think that’s an association he should be getting from a government employee.

“It’s my birth certificate.”  Loki shifts his weight on his feet, chews at his bottom lip.  It’s bruised and scabbed, Tony notices, when he stops.

“That’s fine then.  Do you have a State-issued ID?”

Loki fumbles in his coat pocket but Grace puts her hand up to preclude him.  Her fingers are squeezed through thick gold rings.

“You’ll need to fill out the Birth Certificate Request Form,” says Grace, pointing behind them at a low counter with a plastic rack of papers on it and several pens on long chains.  “Bring it to any window when you’re done.”

“Thanks.”

Tony leads the way over to the table, watches Loki select the correct form and stoop over the counter to fill it out.  He’s methodical, focused, except when he tilts his head back and stares at the ceiling like he’s trying to catch some elusive bit of information.  His handwriting is small, neat capitals.  He gives the form back to Grace when he’s done, along with his driver’s license.  Tony catches a glimpse of a younger Loki with sunken eyes and longer, tangled hair.  Grace pauses, holding it up to read it, then checking it against the form.  She frowns.

“The parents’ names are blank, sir.”

Loki chews his lips again.  “I don’t know them.”  Grace gives Loki a look that’s caught between pity and annoyance, stamps the form and hands him back his license, along with a small slip of paper.  Loki hands over $15 in cash and she nods.  

“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.  We’ll do what we can to help.  You can sit in the waiting area until your number is called.”

“Thanks,” Loki says, backing away from the counter.

“H Seventeen,” he tells Tony, holding up the paper. 

They sit in plastic chairs up against the wall.  There’s a coffee table in front of them with magazines and newspapers strewn over it.  Tony has time to read half of the headline on the  _ Herald _ —Occupy Enters Third Month, Still No—before Loki turns it over.  Tony raises an eyebrow at him but Loki’s staring at the table, jaw clenched.  Tony remembers the glares he’d gotten at the hospital and decides not to ask.  Instead he wraps one hand around Loki’s on the shared arm of their chairs and uses the other to draw his phone out of his pocket and dick around aimlessly.

He’s up to level seven of Tetris when Loki speaks.  “If you haven’t guessed by now, I’m adopted.”

“So if I had guessed you wouldn’t be?”  Tony looks up from his phone.  “Sorry.  When I say stuff like that just remember that I’m an ass.  Anyway.”

“I found out four years ago.  Right around Christmas, actually.”

“How?”  Tony asks, morbidly curious.

Loki shakes his head.  “Doesn’t matter.  I confronted Odin about it; it didn’t go well.  We fought.  I tried to run away but Baldr found me in the park, nearly frozen to death.  It hasn’t really been discussed since.”

Tony hums in assent, slipping his phone back in his pocket.  

“That’s not to say it hasn’t been shouted about.”

“Have you ever met your birth parents?”

“No.  I don’t even know their names.”  He nods towards Grace, whose head is pointed back at her monitor, “That’s why we’re here.  Their names should be on the papers.”

“Do you know who named you Loki?”  It’s an odd question and he knows it, but for some reason he thinks asking might be helpful.  “Your birth parents or your adoptive ones?”

Loki smiles, thin and wry, and that might be the help Tony was looking for.  “Adoptive I’m sure.  Odin couldn’t bear to have a thematically inappropriate fake son.”

“H Sixteen,” says a disembodied, sexless electronic voice.

“Not us,” Tony adds quietly.  Loki looks at him strangely, twitches his hand under Tony’s but doesn’t remove it.

“I suppose this is my place for a bitter monologue about how I always knew I was different and how I never fit in with my family.  It’s true enough, but it doesn’t really matter.  I don’t look like any of them. I don’t think like them. But they’re the ones who spent sixteen years creating a whole world for a little boy that was little more than a curtain to be rudely ripped aside.  I could spend all my time feeling betrayed, but I’m not the one who should suffer.”

“H Seventeen,” intones the voice.  Tony stands, offering a hand out to Loki, who doesn’t take it.  Instead, he stands on his own shaking legs, and walks toward Grace like he’s walking toward his grave.

 

Tony sees the exact moment when Loki registers the information he’s gotten from City Hall.  They’re sitting on a bench in a small park a few blocks away, Tony with a fresh coffee in his hand, a crumpled, empty pastry bag between them.  Loki’s taken the papers out of the manila envelope Grace had handed him, shifted aside the carbon copy of his Birth Certificate Request Form.  He’s been tense, holding himself straight and tall like the tower on a suspension bridge.  Now, he crumbles, like that same tower when all the lines have snapped and the roadway has bucked itself to pieces in the wind.

He passes Tony a light grey piece of paper, the tips of his fingers trembling.  It’s on official stationary with an ostentatious floral border, stamped and signed by an official from the Registry of Vital Records.  Names are filled in in pen, made matte black with photocopying.  There’s a hospital listed, a date and time.  Loki’s name, and the names of two parents: Odin and Frigga Alfadur.

He looks over to find tears leaking out of the corners of Loki’s eyes, his hands balled into fists on his knees.  Tony places the paper back on the stack on Loki’s lap, slips the envelope from under it, and tucks the papers back inside.  He places the whole thing on the bench next to him, scoots it under his thigh so it won’t blow away.  Loki starts when Tony takes his hand, then grips it like it’s the only tether between him and an abyss so big and dark that all the light that enters it never comes out again.  Tony waits, squeezing Loki’s hand as best he can.  Shards of glass seem to have lodged themselves in his throat.  He wants another coffee.  He wants another whisky.  He breathes in through his nose, holds it, breathes out.  

“What do you want to do?” he asks once Loki’s opened his eyes again.  Loki pauses for a moment, face so white Tony thinks he could reflect the entire world with it, before he stands suddenly and puts his hand out.

“The certificate, please.”  Tony hands it to him, unsure what’s going to happen.  Loki lifts it between himself and the sun like he’s looking for a watermark and then slowly, ritualistically, tears it in half.  In half again.  In half again, and his hands are shaking and the pieces threaten to jump out of them when he crumples the whole lot in his fist and starts tearing at it wantonly, a silent scream twisting his lips.  Tony feels himself shrinking back on the bench, away from this intimate and directed violence, watches as Loki tears himself to pieces.

Eventually he throws the pieces on the ground and starts shredding them against the pavement with his feet.

“Lies,” he snarls, in the same voice Tony’d heard him use with Thor— _ “Is it madness? Is it?” _ —“I’ve paid fifteen dollars—“ his voice cants higher, rougher “—and  _ twenty years _ for this.” He twists his ankle, kicking some of the fragments of paper behind him, where they escape into the breeze.  “Fucking.” He does it again.  “Lies!”

He throws himself back on the bench, draws his knees up to his chest and wraps his arms around them.  He makes a dark stain against the verdant light of the park.

“I should go back.”  Loki’s speaking to his knees, his voice muffled by the collar of his coat.  “Fill out the form again, demand that they give me the real records.”

“Maybe they can’t,” Tony says, because his survival instincts do not and have never existed.  “I mean,” he adds quickly, “Maybe there’s something legally against it?  So you couldn’t just pop in on your birth parents and fuck up their lives or something?  N-not that I’m saying that you would, I’m just saying that the law has to apply to everyone and some people would do that and some parents wouldn’t want to be found.”

“What would you have me do instead?”

Tony throws up his hands.  “I don’t know.  Ask your therapis—”

“Fuck my therapist.”

“That’s a breach of doctor-patient privilege.”

Loki turns his head to stare at Tony.  Tony takes this as a plus.

“Or you could Google it?” he offers.  “There have to be resources.  Agencies and shit.  That can help.”  He reaches out for one of Loki’s hands, flinches back.  Picks up his coffee cup and swirls the dregs of grounds and cream.

“I just want to  _ know _ ,” Loki says.  “I don’t want to look, or ask, or…search.  I just want…” His hands fist around his knees; he stamps his feet on the bench.  A curious dog pads over, a brightly colored ball oozing with drool in its mouth.  Tony shoos it away and it takes this as an invitation to lick at his hand.  A guy in jogging clothes calls to it and it whirls away in a rush of dander.

“How about you come over to my place?”  Tony keeps his voice low, like he’s sharing a secret.  “We can watch a movie or play video games or whatever, and if you want to use my laptop to look up adoption services, whenever, that’s fine.”

“My parents will want me home.”

“Fuck your parents.”

The part of Loki’s mouth Tony can see twists into a wry grin.  “That’s a breach of friend-friend privilege.”

“Then don’t take me literally.”  Tony stands, grabs the pastry bag and chucks it into a trashcan with his coffee cup.  He offers Loki his hand.  “Coming?”

Loki takes it, squeezes, releases, and gets to his feet on his own.

 

#

DAY 16

Tony wakes with a stiff neck and a sore back.  After a moment, he feels the pressure of his couch behind the pain, tilting to the right slightly.  He levers his eyes open, slides them around until he sees what’s making his couch behave oddly.  Loki is sprawled out next to him, long body folded in on itself, head pillowed on a throw cushion Tony vaguely remembers unearthing from the linen closet.  His long hair is a tangled waterfall over his face.  His dark green shirt is riding up his back, exposing vertebrae like tiny mountains or the spines on a Stegosaurus.

Tony stands because his legs are stiff in addition to his entire spinal column.  His knees pop impressively when he straightens them.  On Tony’s low glass coffee table, his laptop swirls patterns of color generated from an algorithm jointly run by twenty computers sharing the same screensaver.  

The kitchen coughs up the remains of a box of cereal, which Tony decides to save for Loki, and half a loaf of bread, two slices of which Tony pops in the toaster.  He takes the mostly empty bottle of Jack out of the cabinet, stuffs it under the sink before remembering that’s where the trash can is, and settles for stashing it in a higher cabinet.  He doubts Loki will be snooping around his kitchen too much at any rate.  From here, he can see the pale curves of Loki’s feet sticking off the edge of the couch.  His toes twitch and Tony wonders if he’s waking up.  He freezes for a moment, but Loki just sighs loudly, rolls over, and, as far as Tony can tell, stays asleep.  The toaster coughs up his bread, barely warmed but edible, and Tony slathers the pieces with peanut butter, sandwiches them.  He takes his breakfast back to the couch, settling himself on the floor so as not to disturb Loki.  He sets his food beside him and hauls his laptop into his lap.  It blinks awake as he does so, still open to the garish homepage of the Boston Area Adoption Services website, which appears to have been coded in 1999, when tables were still an acceptable formatting mechanism.

His mail program alerts him to unread messages: he scrolls through an endless stream of campus news and department updates, long email chains between Hammer and the rest of the lab that passive-aggressively call out people who don’t empty the grounds from the coffee machine, or who use the lab supply of solder and don’t alert the manager when they’re running out.  Then there’s the requisite mailing list messages from various clubs and societies Tony’d given one of his addresses to in exchange for free shit.  A few messages from Obie, asking after the blueprints, after Pepper.  Tony reads their subject lines and marks them as read.

A message from 5 am from someone Tony hasn’t heard from in months.

 

_ Hey Tony, _

_ Remembering you yelling at me for mistreating my keyboards, I hope I’m not sentencing this one to an early grave by grinding dust into it.  Then again, the IT officer in charge assures me it can withstand pretty much anything, so I shouldn’t be worried.  But if there’s one thing I haven’t gotten used to about Afghanistan, it’s the dust.  It’s everywhere.  It’s in your teeth when you wake up, in the air in rooms that are usually closed, in the food.  We had some motivational speeches in class about how there’s no race in the Army and everyone’s blood runs red, white, and blue and I think I can finally see what they were talking about.  You can’t tell anyone from anyone, really, other than by the shape of their hats. _

_ The tanks are running well, thanks to me and the Starktech on them.  I do have some suggestions for improvement though. Can’t wait to have you in the director’s chair so we can really tweak this stuff for maximum field efficiency.  Not that it’s bad, or ineffective, but there are some things that you only learn by living with them in a combat situation. _

_ I have some leave coming up, not enough to come back to the States but enough to get me to Turkey for Christmas.  I don’t really know how to picture it.  I guess I don’t know much about how Christmas looks other than tinsel and  mall Santas.   _

_ I probably shouldn’t say that about Christmas.  A lot of people take your opinion of Christmas really seriously around here. _

_ Anyway I’m looking forward to that.  It’ll be nice to be in a big city again for a little while.  (I’m going to Istanbul).  I’ll try to send you something from there as a present. _

_ How are you doing?  Is the thesis project coming along better?  I know last time we talked you were pretty stressed out. Don’t forget that if you need me for anything, don’t hesitate to call.  I will gladly give you all the dust-covered, laggy advice and support that I can. _

_ Hope you’re doing well, hope to hear from you soon and am looking forward to the next batch of Stark weapons to make their way into the dust cloud. _

_ Your friend, _

_ Rhodie _

 

There’s the soft slide of fabric on leather and Tony instinctively slams his laptop shut.  Loki blinks lazily at him, the heel of one hand scrubbing at his face.

“What time is it?”

Tony checks his phone. “Eleven thirty-ish.”

Loki groans and rolls onto his back, burying his face in his hands.  His shirt’s riding up, pale skin slicing under the dark green fabric like shafts of sunlight through blinds.  “I should go home,” he says.

“No,” Tony says before he thinks about it.  Loki stares at him, brow furrowed, frowning just a little.  “I-I mean,” Tony adds, then pauses.  He doesn’t really know what he means, just that the idea of Loki leaving makes his throat go dry.  

“I’ve been ignoring my parents’ calls for eighteen hours.  They’ve probably sent out a search party.”

“So call them,” Tony replies, wondering why the hell he’s never practical about getting back to Obie, “And tell them you’re with me and that you’re safe and that we’re going to go out today.  Into the city.  To do stuff.”

“They’re going to be angry.”

“Fuck ‘em.  You’re over eighteen aren’t you?  And you’ll be supervised or whatever it is the hospital wants.”

“You underestimate my adoptive family’s persistence.”

“You underestimate your ability to fight back.”

Something crosses Loki’s face: something dark, something dangerous.  Tony feels his pulse quicken in an entirely different way.

Loki fishes in his pocket, pulls out an iPhone a couple models old in a leather case.  He thumbs at the screen, holds it to his ear, closes his eyes.

Tony can hear the muffled roar of a voice but can’t tell what it’s saying.  Loki flinches when it starts.  If Tony’s not mistaken tears glisten on his eyelashes.

“I’m with a friend, Father,” he finally grits out, drawing his knees up and curling his toes hard around the edge of a cushion.  “He’s looking after me.  I’m fine.”  The voice roars again; Tony wonders if it’s even saying words.  “I should have called you after my appointment to let you know I wasn’t coming home.  I apologize.”  More roaring.  Loki takes a deep breath that ratchets into and out of his lungs.  “I’m staying with him today,” he nearly shouts, “Goodbye.”  And hangs up, places the phone face down on the coffee table.  Presses the heels of his hands against his eyes and takes a few deep breaths through his mouth.  Tony watches the way his lips wrap around the air.

“You OK?”

Loki sits up and brushes a tangled clump of hair behind his ear.  His cheeks are blotchy pink; his eyes still bright like wet stones.  He nods.  “Are you going to eat that toast?” he asks.

Tony looks down at his sandwich, back up at Loki.  The thought of eating congealed, stale peanut butter is suddenly vaguely repulsive.  Plus he doesn’t have anything left for Loki.

“Nah,” he says, standing up and offering Loki his hand, “Let’s go out for breakfast.”

Loki takes his hand, hauls himself to his feet.  He’s crammed between Tony and the couch, feet placed between Tony’s, looking down at him.  Tony can feel Loki’s breath on his face.  He smells of synthetic lavender and spice and stale, slightly sweaty skin.  “All right,” Loki says so low it’s almost a purr and Tony feels it through the floor.  “But let me shower first.”

“Bathroom’s through the bedroom and on the left,”  Tony says.  He barely remembers to step away.

 

Tony takes Loki to a cafe about a block from his building with handpainted snowmen on the window and faded record sleeves for wallpaper.  They sit at a table along the wall and Tony inhales an omelette while Loki picks, birdlike, at over-easy eggs and toast.  He hunches over his plate, glancing around like he’s scared that someone will come up behind him and drag him away.  Tony insists on paying; Loki only agrees when Tony adds that this doesn’t set up any kind of running tab between them.  The waitress brings him his card back and there’s nothing between Loki and the door. 

“So,” Tony says, shoving his card back in his wallet—black leather with worn corners; he picked it up from some high end store a few years ago because he liked the idea that someone could sell something so simple for so much money—and trying to smile.  Sunlight strikes the table next to Loki, stinging at Tony’s eyes.  “What now?”

Loki places his napkin on the table, folds it into a neat square.  He tweaks it as he talks: pulling the corners into sharper and sharper angles, making sure the edges are straight.  “I was thinking of visiting the State Adoption Specialist today.”  

“Cool.”

There’s a pause.  Loki pats the napkin flatter.  Tony waves away the waiter, who tries to refill his coffee.  

“You… can come if you want,” Loki says, looking at the table.  “I’d like it.  If you came.”

 

They take a bus to the State Adoption Specialist’s office; Loki picks at the scratches on its plexiglas windows while Tony stares out at the blur of the city and thinks about velocity, about momentum, about inertia.  They get off near City Hall and cross the channel on foot, dodging tourists in colorful scarves taking pictures against the dull grey of the sky.  A woman puts her hand on Loki’s arm and he jumps; she asks him to take a picture of her and her family.  He takes her camera, peers through the viewfinder, clicks the shutter closed.  He hands back the camera and shakes off his fingers as they walk away.

The State Adoption Specialist is on the second floor of a building done in brick and glass with rough granite window frames in a small neighborhood of similar architecture.  The tourist traffic diverts around it: some to the courthouse, the piers, the maritime park; others to the children’s museum, the restaurant district.  The office itself is modern, minimalist, with shiny cubed furniture in black lacquered wood.  They sit in the small waiting room beside a monstrously large fake fern with Astroturf-colored foliage.  Loki fills out a questionnaire on a clear plastic clipboard and hands it to the secretary, then sits back down with Tony and twists his hands in his lap.

Eventually, the black lacquered door in the corner opens and a short man in a suit leans out.  He has the kind of face that looks too wide for a mouth that isn’t smiling; rimless glasses perch on a string over his textured tie and his crisp dress shirt is rolled up to the elbows.

“You guys need some advice?” he asks.  Loki stands stiffly, wipes his hands on his pants, nods.  The guy emerges from his office long enough to grab Loki’s sheet from the secretary and gestures them back.  “Are you two siblings?”  Loki shakes his head.  The man hesitates, darts his eyes over Tony, who does his best to look genial and nonthreatening.  “I’m not an attorney so the things I’ll discuss aren’t privileged, but I do strive to maintain the privacy of my clients.  Whichever of you is not the interested party may be asked to leave at any time, by myself or my client.”

Tony nods, holding the door open after Loki and the specialist.

“As long as that’s understood,” the specialist says as he steps aside.

The inner office is small with narrow windows striped by thick, half open blinds.  More fake plants drip from bookshelves and slim stands in the corners.  Two leather swivel chairs on the near side of the desk oppose a throne like piece behind it.  The specialist takes a seat and gestures for Tony and Loki to do the same.  Tony sits nearer the edge of the desk, in front of the guy’s nameplate—Christopher Foley—which he flicks with his finger until it’s knocked out of alignment.

For his part, Christopher Foley sets his glasses on his nose and steeples his fingers.  He scans over Loki’s questionnaire, takes his glasses off, sighs.  

“I don’t know how much you know about Massachusetts adoption law,” he starts, looking from Tony to Loki with a kind of blank professionalism that Tony can’t help but admire.  Loki shrugs, lips thin and white.  “OK.  You state here that you were adopted in the state of Massachusetts.  How sure are you about that?”

Loki shrugs again, wets his lips.  “I’ve never been told the family has lived anywhere else.  My adoptive family.”

Foley nods, looking directly and solely at Loki now.  “Then we’re a place to start if you can’t get any other information from your adoptive parents.”  Loki shakes his head at the implied question.  “That’s fine.  Just be aware that we may not uncover anything because the paperwork was filed in a different state.  You’re twenty-one?”  Loki nods.  “Excellent.”

Foley looks over to Tony, including him again.  “There are two classes of information that you can access.  The first and easiest is non-identifying, things like education level, health status, socioeconomic status.  That information can be accessed by writing to the agency that handled your adoption with a request.  One of the services I can provide for you is identifying which agency holds the records for your adoption.  

“Second, there’s identifying information, which can only be released to you if your birth parents have given the adoption agency permission to disclose it to you.  That information can only be furnished if you get a court order.  I can also help you with the application process for a court order, but I can make no guarantees about the status of identifying records.  There will also be court fees and potentially attorney fees as well, in addition to my fees.”

He tilts his chin towards the door, closed behind them.  “Samantha will help you with payment for today’s consultation when you leave.”  Loki’s jaw twitches.  Tony pats his pocket reflexively, checking for his wallet.

“For the moment,” Loki says, and Tony could cut himself on his tone of voice, “I will retain you for the purpose of identifying the agency that handled my adoption.”

“Excellent.”  Foley leans back in his chair, opens a drawer in his desk.  He removes a sheaf of carbon copy papers, clicks open a pen, makes a few checks.  Hands the papers to Loki and directs him with the pen where to sign.

“With any luck I’ll have information for you by the end of the week.  List your preferred method of contact and I can leave the information with you then.  A bill will be sent to your address subsequently, based on the amount of time it takes me to find your information.  My rates are listed on the agreement.”

Tony watches Loki pause over the billing address area, clicking the pen open and closed, open and closed.  He leans over, hand on Loki’s arm, and whispers in his ear.

“Bill it to me.”

“What?”  Loki whispers.

“Bill it to me.  You don’t want Thor or Odin to know, send the bill to my house.  I’ll pay.”

“Tony—”

Tony reaches over, plucks the pen from Loki’s hand, scrawls his address.  He places the pen back in Loki’s limp fingers and squeezes his shoulder.

Foley is watching them with raised eyebrows.  Tony flicks at his nameplate again; it jumps sideways.

Loki finishes the paperwork and hands it over.  Foley skims it, nods to himself, rips off Loki’s copy and files the rest.  “Looks like everything is in order,” Foley says, “Do you have any other questions?” 

Loki’s already standing, the legs of his chair scudding against the carpet.  “No.  Thank you.”  He turns to leave before Foley can show them both out.

The building spits them into bright sunlight slicing through clouds and air gritty with salt and exhaust.  Tony has to jog to keep up with Loki as he strides blindly into the street, across it, turns left towards the end of the block.  Tony waves an apologetic hand at the traffic Loki cuts off.  One of the drivers gives them the finger.

Loki finally stops at the curb of Seaport Boulevard and stares, blank-eyed, to the left until the light changes across the canal and the street empties.  Tony catches his arm as he steps out; Loki whirls on him, mouth open, but Tony slides his fingers down to Loki’s and tugs him along.  Loki comes, and by the time they’re on the sidewalk again, his fingers are squeezing Tony’s.

They end up at a small square of grass tucked between steel-and-glass skyscrapers.  Smooth white sculptures across from them approximate flamingos, egrets.  Tony tugs Loki’s hand as he sits down on the grass; Loki stands above him, coat swirling around his calves.  He looks out at the buildings like he can see miles beyond them.  Tony feels a tightness in his chest so familiar that its absence should have been more notable than its presence.  He drops Loki’s hand and starts picking at the grass instead, tearing three-leafed clovers into false luck.

“I don’t know why I expected this to be easy,” Loki says.  “I just…I thought I’d walk in and give them my ID or sign something and—” he waves his hands in front of him “—poof! My birthparents would appear.  Or the guy would look at me and just be able to tell from the sound of my voice or the color of my skin or something who I was supposed to belong to.”

_ You can belong to me _ , Tony doesn’t say.  He’s not quite surprised that he thinks it.  Loki looks down at him, mouth twitching at the edges like a hand the moment before it opens.  “Come on,” he says, “There’s an art gallery around here I want to show you.”

 

Loki leads him down to an old warehouse by the water, freshly painted and opened up with huge panes of glass so that Tony can see right through it—past the exhibits and the track lighting, out to the water—without going inside.  It reminds him of an exhibit of traveling cadavers that had come briefly to town when he was in high school.  He’d dragged Rhodie to it and, after lying about their ages, they’d spent hours staring at carcasses carved in half down the middle with gel pumped into the veins and arteries and intestines so they stayed plump.  The flesh was dyed bright colors like in an anatomy textbook and it felt less like looking at real bodies than like looking at a hologram of a particularly detailed diagram.  Tony had gone away itching to design a holographic interface unit with the same resolution and interactive qualities as the exhibit; Rhodie had followed, considerably less excited, and when Tony insisted they stop for burgers on the way home Rhodie ordered something with beans and cheese in it instead.  The exhibit was shut down before Tony finished his hologram unit because of some technicality about it being illegal to transport bodies over state lines.  It was sad, really; Tony had been hoping to use it to calibrate his system.

Now, he follows Loki to a blocky front desk and pulls out his wallet.  “Wednesday nights are free for students,” Loki tells him, so Tony slides his wallet away, reaches for his key fob, and flashes his student card instead.  

The gallery itself is ephemeral, built of cheap plaster walls that fall about a foot short of the ceiling.  Tony bets that if he pushed at one hard enough, he could have millions of dollars worth of art cascading around him. The gallery seems to be divided into labyrinthine halves starting a few feet ahead: to the left, elegant sculptures of glass peer from the walls like a crowd of glittering ghosts; to the right, there’s a hodgepodge of pieces: huge squares of canvas with bright paint slashed across them, delicate faceless statues in bronze, a pile of cracked ceramic plates.  Loki takes him into the righthand side first, stops at a confused, low sculpture towards the back.

The piece seems to be made of one piece of tarnished copper pressed into the body of a man, sitting cross-legged with a blanket over his feet.  The blanket merges into a long-snouted dog with spiked, wild fur that becomes, on points of contact, the bars of a cage surrounding the both of them.  Tony can see where a chisel had struck, where a thumb had pressed into warm, almost molten metal.  He can see which parts had oxidized first: snowy tips on the dog’s fur, the man’s fingers.   

“Huh,” he says.  He seems to remember that there’s a script for art appreciation, some set list of statements it’s OK to make about pieces.  He doesn’t know any of them.

Loki puts his hand out like he’s going to touch the cage, or maybe stroke the dog’s fur.  “I followed this piece even before it came here.  I was so excited when I heard they had acquired it.

“Do you know what this is a sculpture of?”

_ Me _ , Tony thinks, looking at the way the dog’s fangs are bared at the man, the way the blanket is ripped aside, the way the cage melts into everything it contains.  “The aftermath of incompetent zookeeping?”

“No.”  But there’s a smile in Loki’s voice.  “The artist Joseph Beuys once spent a week in a cage with a wild coyote.  It was a piece of performance art.  About a decade later, one of his lesser-known contemporaries made this piece depicting the event.  He turned performance into permanence.”  This time Loki does touch the piece, running his hand along one of the bars, down to the dog.  Tony has the urge to yank his hand away before he can touch the dog’s coat, fearful without reason that the dog will turn on him.  “I could go on about how the act of creating physicality out of action is beautiful and how each of us risks our performance becoming permanent, but,”  Loki shrugs.  Tony nods like he understands, like he’s not trying to parse the expression on Beuys’ golem’s face.  The copper is roughly pressed, making it difficult to separate brow ridges from texturing.  Still, he looks serene, if gaunt.  Tony wonders how he did it. 

Eventually, Loki steps away and leads Tony through the rest of the gallery, pointing out his favorite pieces.  When they get to the throng of glass figures, Tony’s so enthralled by the way light skitters into rainbows in the depths of the forms that it takes Loki tugging at his jacket to make him look away.  

“I left but you weren’t behind me,” Loki explains.

They grab lunch from a gyro truck parked down the block.  Tony almost drips yogurt sauce on himself, too busy watching Loki’s thin fingers cradle his food.  When they finish, Tony lobs both paper wrappers into the trash and, before Loki can grab his phone or suggest they take the next bus back, grabs his hand and leads him across the street.  Loki doesn’t ask where they’re going, but Tony watches how his eyebrows raise in surprise when Tony buys him a ticket to the Children’s Museum.

He leads Loki through the lobby, light and open and fronted with glass, past leggy statues made of repurposed railroad track and a pirate ship in garish recycled plastic boards, hung with netting like spiderwebs knotted with kids. It’s new since Tony was here last. Loki twists behind him as they pass it by, trying to sidestep the children that dart around Tony’s legs.

The stairs are clearer, so Tony lets go of Loki as he jogs up to the third floor.  He can hear huffing laughter behind him as Loki tries to keep up.  “Tony, what are we doing?”

“I want to show you something!” 

Loki appears beside him, slightly out of breath.  “We’re getting stared at.”

Tony shrugs, grabs Loki’s hand but Loki flinches away.  It hits Tony like a punch to the gut.  “Oh come on,” he says, trying to keep his voice light, “It’s not because of that.  It’s weirder that we’re wandering around without a kid in tow.”  He waits for a moment, hoping Loki will reach for him, but instead Loki grips the banister and pushes off, climbing past Tony.  He catches up, overtakes Loki and waits for him at the top of the stairs, pretending to be very interested in the directory, printed low and large on the wall.

“What did you want to show me?”

Tony grins despite himself, backs into the room next to him.  Loki pauses at the threshold to read the sign above the door.  “What are we doing?” he asks again, shoving his hands in his pockets as he enters.  A kid runs past him, waving a block in the air and he jumps out of the way.

“You showed me your museum, I’m showing you mine.”  Tony gestures expansively at the tiny worktables, the bins of blocks and small robotic cranes; at the scaffolding and catwalks and climbing structures; at the miniature bulldozers that bump around the space, piloted by five-year-olds.  “C’mere,” he adds, because he’s still getting the sense that Loki’s one misplaced Lego away from bolting.  Loki follows him across the room, avoiding the children like they’re some sort of very communicable pestilence.

Tony crouches down by the wind tunnel. It’s built from a horizontal clear plastic tube sealed at both ends, with an access hatch up top.  A tray of foam pieces in front of it, each piece notched at one end.  Plastic bulbs with appropriately sized slits stand in a row in the tube.  Loki leans over beside him, hands on his knees.  His hair cascades into his face so all Tony can see is a thin, pale slice of nose. 

“This is a wind tunnel,” Tony explains. “You’re supposed to use it to design the best windmill.”  He picks up some of the pieces and fits them into the plastic bulbs, making an array of asymmetrical turbines.  Leans over, closes the lid, presses a red button in the tray.  A whir as a fan comes to life, and Tony’s windmill starts—jerkily, slowly—to spin.

“But,”  Tony continues, motioning for Loki to wait as he reaches for an adjacent tray, “You can make buildings in it too.”  He grabs a few foam blocks and sets them in a rough arch in front of the windmill.  The structure blows apart easily, but Tony rescues the blocks from the end of the tube and hands them to Loki for safekeeping.  “They did this kind of thing all the time in the sixties and seventies, using wind tunnels to test out different building materials.  ‘Course then it was because stuff needed to withstand nuclear blasts—or they thought it did anyway—so they’d make these giant tubes out of, like, concrete, with foam and stuff to reinforce them, and they’d hang dynamite--” he points to the plastic tube to illustrate--“To get different wind speeds.  And then they’d put some masonry or something,” he piles some of the foam blades at the far end of the tunnel, “On the end, turn the thing on,” he does; pieces of foam flutter violently and launch backwards off the pile, “And see what happened.  Y’know those mock neighborhoods you see in movies about the cold war, with all the dummies watering their lawns and shit?  They’d do that. So like, they’d have this corner of a brick wall and this school scene, complete with desks and little dummies in school uniforms and, I dunno, a fucking fish tank or a whiteboard or something, and then they’d launch this wind at it and see how fucked everyone inside would be.”

Loki’s not looking at him; he’s playing with the blocks, rolling them over and over in his hand.  When Tony stops talking, he nods shortly as if to confirm that he’s been listening.  Tony falters, unsure what to do.

“Um, d’you want to, um, try to build something?  And see how it works with the wind?”

“Sure,” Loki says, but it’s vacant, automatic.  He doesn’t move to put his pieces in the wind tunnel.

Somewhere close by, there’s a clatter of falling blocks and the beginnings of a wail.  

“Be right back,” Tony says, and darts away.  He finds the crying kid at the earthquake table, her structure collapsed into a messy pile in front of her.

“Hey,” Tony says, kneeling down next to her.  She sniffles and stares at him from behind thick bangs, suspicious.  “Did your building fall over?”  The kid nods.  “What did it look like?”  Slowly, she reaches for the blocks, stacking them into a neat, solid obelisk.

“But it doesn’t stay,” she says, hitting the button to shake the table.  The blocks clatter apart again and the girl screws up her face.

“Right,” Tony says preemptively, “So now you know that design doesn’t work.”  The girl stares at him, twisting her hands in her skirt.  “So try something else,” Tony arranges a layer of blocks.  The girl copies his design, building up four layers before he stops her.  He hits the button this time, watches the girl’s face as their structures shudder, clatter, and hold.  The machine shakes itself out with the two tiny buildings still standing.  The girl is beaming, both front teeth gone, and she accepts Tony’s high five before bouncing off to another station.

Tony swivels on his heels to check on Loki.  If he’s not there—or if he is, and he’s looking at Tony like he looks at the kids—then Tony doesn’t know what exactly he’ll do, just that it will involve running and, eventually, that bottle of Jack.  But Loki’s still at the wind tunnel, looking through it at Tony, and though the plastic warps his expression, Tony thinks he’s smiling.  

“Excuse me, are you Tony Stark?”

There’s a woman beside him in a bright green T-shirt that labels her as Children’s Museum Staff.  Tony stands and offers her his hand, which she shakes with a grip like a limp fish.  “Hi,” he says, searching for a nametag and not finding one.  “What can I do for you?”

“I saw you helping that girl,” Children’s Museum Staff says, “I heard you were going to school in the area—”  Tony manages to keep his smile in place “—And I was wondering if you’d like to support the Museum?  Or come by and help us out sometimes?  You look like a natural and your help would be greatly appreciated.”

“I’ll think about it,” Tony smiles at her before shaking her hand again.  “Thanks.”

He returns to Loki, who has built an obelisk not dissimilar to the girl’s, and is watching it get blown to pieces by the wind.  Tony sighs, standing over him.  “Look,” he says, and it’s hard to get the words out, but he feels Children’s Museum Staff staring at him and maybe this is the best thing after all, “We can go if you want to.  I just…”  He stops, unwilling to collapse the infinite possibilities of that sentence into one.

Loki looks up at him, hair curling around his cheeks and eyes distant.  “I can’t build anything that doesn’t get destroyed,” he says softly.  Tony smiles so broadly it hurts and crouches.  

“Do you want me to show you how?”

Loki nods, hands him some blocks.  When Tony tries to take them, Loki grabs his wrist gently with his other hand, sliding down to twine Tony’s fingers with his.  And  _ this _ is what happiness feels like, this shaking, fragile, sharp and glowing thing that’s clenching and bubbling around Tony’s  _ everything  _ and then Loki’s mouth is on his, just for an instant, but it’s enough for Tony to memorize the roughness of Loki’s lips—chapped, he calls it later—and the warmth behind them.   

Then they’re apart, but close, and Loki’s blushing of all things, splotchy and red, and Tony’s hands are shaking as he places the blocks, one by one, into the tube.

On the bus ride back across the canal, with Loki’s hand resting lightly on his knee, Tony thinks about black holes, about dying stars, about the energy that correlates with unthinkably high density.  “I was offered a volunteer position at the museum,” he says.  

“Mm?”

Tony watches the skyline slide by through the window.  

“You should do it,” Loki says quietly, leaning over to rest his head lightly on Tony’s shoulder.

 

The apartment is dark like the backs of his eyelids when Tony slides into it.  He moves languidly to the couch and flops down, lips still warm from Loki’s.  

He’d stolen a kiss at the bus station, longer and deeper than the one at the museum, before Loki headed north and Tony took the subway home.

Tony’s laptop is on the floor by the couch; he leans over and grabs it, settling it on his stomach.  A few clicks and he’s at the volunteer sign-up page for the Boston Children’s Museum.  He downloads the interactive PDF.  Opens it.  

Realizes he hasn’t eaten dinner yet, and that it is late, and that he, a responsible adult, should fix that.  He finds the same box of cereal from earlier, the same loaf of bread.  Decides that neither of these constitute dinner and pokes through the rest of his cabinets in search of canned vegetables, rice, ramen.  The only thing he finds is the whiskey, glittering golden in the evening light; lifts the bottle to his lips out of habit.

Tony stops, very deliberately, and sets the bottle down.  His arm feels like one of the miniature cranes at the Children’s Museum: heavy, jerky, imperfectly controlled.  If he drinks, he will lose the flavor of Loki on his lips.

He leaves the kitchen with the box of cereal, throwing fistfulls into his mouth.  He settles back at his laptop and stares down the application form while he eats.  Notices that his pulse is jittering in his throat, that his feet twitch against the coffee table.  That there is something, a weight, an anchor, dragging straight through his stomach towards the kitchen.

When he’s done with the cereal, he recycles the box and shoves the whiskey into the back of the cabinet under the sink, behind the trash can, label towards the wall.  There’s no face on the bottle, but it still feels like it’s watching him.

He takes his laptop into the bedroom, trying to remember the way Loki’s lips had curved under his, the flutter of breath against his cheeks.  He smiles, for a moment.  Feels lighter.

 

_ Heya War Machine, (I made that up.  Just now.  You like it?)  _

_ Glad to hear the war machines Daddy-Oh made you are marginally ineffective.  (I say Daddy-Oh, I mean some poor team of engineers from India working in China using heavily modified versions of his blueprints.  But you know.  Close enough.)  Nothing like the schism between design and application to remind you to have zero faith in the military-industrial complex.  (Am I allowed to say that?  Will the people who read your mail before it gets to you censor it because it’s anti-American?  Can I even be anti-American, considering my parentage?) Don’t worry about the dust though.  You break it, you just buy more from Stark Industries and become Obie’s favorite contract.  (That’s a lie, you’re already Obie’s favorite contract.) _

_ Don’t even ask me about my thesis I will build Rhodie-seeking missiles and launch them at you.  _

_ Istanbul sounds like fun times.  Don’t forget to take the uniform off and like actually enjoy yourself while you’re there.  They call it leave for a reason, you know.  Leave your troubles behind, or some shit.  Anyway I hear it’s very cool to go around calling Istanbul Constantinople.  Hipster.   _

_ Happy early consumerism day! _

_ —T _

 

His mail program beeps at him as he’s typing, but he ignores it until he’s done replying to Rhodie.  Then he swipes over to his inbox, where there’s an urgent message from Obie, subject line accented by three exclamation points.

He opens it, feeling like he should take shelter under his bed, lest it explode.

But instead of the very personal upbraiding he realizes he was waiting for, it’s a form letter sent to everyone above a certain tier in Stark Industries, cordially inviting him to the thirteenth annual Stark Industries Christmas Gala, held in the heart of New York City.

His throat’s painfully dry; he’s halfway to the kitchen before he stops, waits, breathes, heads instead to the bathroom and rinses his face in the sink.  His phone’s in his pocket—in his hand.  His lips still tingle with imagined warmth.

_ “Whatre you doing on friday?” _

Back to his laptop.  He tabs away from his email.  The only other open window is the volunteer form.  He starts typing in his details, finds he can do it if he doesn’t think about it.  His phone buzzes.

_ “Disappointing my adoptive family.  Why?” _

_ “We should go to New York. On the train. Nice way to waste a day.” _

He enters his address in the form.  His hands are definitely not shaking.  He grabs his phone again. “ _ And theres a company christmas party that I have to go to—“ _

_ “I dont know if I can spend the whole day”  _ Loki replies as he’s typing.

_ “—And I can bring a guest _ ”

Tony finishes the form; gets a drink of water; double checks the form; triple checks it; paces; closes his eyes and curses and submits it; spends a small eternity clenching and unclenching his fists in the doorway to his bedroom, the warm phone in his hand the only thing that keeps him from leaving.  Loki has still not responded.  Tony brushes his teeth, marveling at how toothpaste tastes entirely different when it’s not chasing booze, and shrugs into a pair of battered sweatpants.  He lies back on his bed, staring at the ceiling through pixelated night vision. His mouth aches for something bitter.

His phone buzzes.

_ “I can’t.” _

He is thirsty, terribly so.  His tongue is thick in his throat, so swollen and dry it’s hard to breathe.

“ _ Oh.” _

The kitchen is closer than it should be, darkness contracting around him, reeling him in. 

He stares despondently into the fridge for awhile, aware that he is only delaying the inevitable.  He holds the door open until he’s shivering, eyes gone bleary from staring at stained and empty shelves, the only thing still edible a bottle of cranberry concentrate he bought months ago to mix with vodka and Sprite.  Back when he still mixed drinks.

His phone buzzes long and insistent in his pocket.  He drops to the floor as he answers it, one hand clenched around the lip of the vegetable drawer, knuckles white as the plastic shelving.  He prays—to the black, empty, dead expanse of the Universe—that it isn’t Obidiah.  “‘Lo?”

“Um, hi Tony.”  

He barely keeps himself from keening, Loki’s voice hot against him like sun on frostbite.  It hurts, almost.  He curls up on the floor, fridge door swinging in to bang at his knees.  He ignores it.  

“Loki,”  This too is a prayer.

“I… thought my text might have been misleading.  In retrospect.  Um.  I have a—shall we say—an aversion to company Christmas parties.  Um.  I haven’t been to one in years.  Not since—“  His voice is shaking, quiet, an unsteady star.  Tony curls closer in on himself, buries his nose between his knees.  “Not since Baldr died.  Um.  That’s.  When he died.  Baldr.  At a company Christmas party.  So I don’t.  Go.  Anymore.”

“Oh,”  Tony says because he has to say something.  Of course.  Of course he’ll have to go alone, face the board members who’ve only seen him in pictures or newsprint—and of course those have all been mug shots recently, tabloid photos outside of courtrooms, and references by Obie of all the work he hasn’t gotten done.  

He feels suddenly, powerfully, that he is sitting atop a towering pile of sand.  Grains press into this heels, almost cutting, not quite, but what he feels most is the void that filters between them, the empty space that is infinitely larger in volume than the sand itself, the maw that waits to swallow him if he should even breathe.  He knows what it would be to suffocate, filled up with nothingness until he can’t see the back of his own teeth.

“I’m sorry.”

A voice in his ear, cold at his back. Somehow it’s only been a few seconds.  He tries to reply, to say “It’s fine,” or “I’m sorry.”  What comes out is a rasping, broken whine.  He wonders what monster climbed into his mouth while he was away.

“Tony?  Tony what happened.”

He tries to remember the warmth of Loki’s lips but he can’t, he can’t, he can’t; instead he thinks of the bridge, of lights reflected in the water, of the applications of force and velocity to the human body.  It helps.

“Hi Loki.”

“Tony.”

“Yeah.”  He feels the bones of his knee under his hand.  Feels the flesh of his hand on his knee.  They are dense enough that, for the moment, nothing will get through.

“Do you have to go to the party?”

“Yes.”  A flash of Obie, jaw unhinged and full of fangs, roaring at him, gnawing at his bones.  A nightmare he’s had before.

This day had been going so well.

“I’m sorry, I’m the worst person you could ask.”

When the sun explodes, will the Earth die from the heat or from the wave of foreign mass?

“Loki, I—“  He can’t.

Loki’s voice, soft, like a caress.  “I liked kissing you today.”

Tony kneads his knuckles against the floor.  His hands need to move.  He remembers a paper bag filled with coffee and styrofoam cups.  Remembers being, for a moment, that strong.

“So did I,” he says.  Simple truth.

“I would like to go to New York with you.”  Warmth glows in his stomach, still knotted and tight.  He scoots around, faces the fridge.  Takes a long swallow of cranberry concentrate, grimaces at the way it burns.  “But I can’t promise the party.”

“Please,” Tony says, “If you can come.  We don’t need to stay long or anything, I really just need to show my face a little.  We can leave within an hour, I promise.”

Silence.  Like the tide sucking away at a beach, grinding Tony into tinier and tinier pieces.

“It’s that important?”  Loki asks, like he’s hoping for an impossible answer.

“Yeah.”

A wet, violent sound.  He’d go alone if it means Loki can stay.  He wants to drag Loki in with him.

“Then I’ll try.”

Sunlight breaking through clouds.  A beach just after high tide, when all the dunes have been planed.

#

DAY 18

Loki shows up at Tony’s apartment early on Friday, hair mussed, carrying a garment bag.  Dark flushes under his eyes like bruises.  Tony stands aside to let him in, unsure of whether he can greet him with a kiss.  Loki answers the question, slipping the hand not holding the garment bag around Tony’s waist and pressing close.  He sighs shakily when they part, fingers picking at the fabric of Tony’s shirt.

“Hey,” Tony says.  Loki nods.

“I went to my therapist again yesterday,” he says, stepping away and speaking as if this is light conversation,  “He gave me a prescription for antidepressants.  Ridiculous.  I’m suicidal, right?  Like I can’t kill myself with a bottle full of Prozac.”

Tony smiles but it feels thin, like cracking ice.  He follows Loki into his apartment, chucking a throw pillow back onto the couch as he passes it.  Loki pauses outside of Tony’s bedroom, turns.

“Should I put this on here,” he asks, gesturing with the garment bag, “Or wait until we’re in the City?”

“It’ll get rumpled on the train,” Tony offers, “Besides, suits are for funerals.  The less we look like we’re going to a wake, the better.”

Something dark settles in Loki’s eyes.

“Shit,” Tony adds hastily, running a hand through his hair, “Sorry.  God.  Sorry.”  

Loki’s mouth quirks a smile that looks as fragile as Tony feels.  “When’s our train?” he asks.

 

Light is soft through the scratched train window, scattered by clouds.  Tony’s cheek hums where he’s rested it against the plexiglas.  Loki’s a warm weight to his left, his shoulder barely brushing Tony’s.  He’s talking about—something, Tony doesn’t remember what.  His voice is a low lilt in the background, drowned out by the discordant ticking of the clocks in Tony’s head.  One is counting up from 2 p.m. three days ago, when he finished his water bottle of Jack; the other counting down to seven thirty tonight.  He can hear their ticking loud in his ears, discordant, out of sync, and he thinks that this is not how time should work, that it should not disappear from before him at a faster rate than it piles up behind him; but this moment, with his cheek against the window and Loki to his left, feels infinite.  Spacetime warped by the gravity of tonight, dark and heavy, swallowing up his horizon.

He can’t think.  He needs to quiet the ticking, make one of the clocks stop.  Maybe if he does he’ll be able to hear what Loki’s telling him.

“Be right back,” he says as he stands, grabbing his coat before it slides off his lap, “Bathroom.”

Loki looks surprised and Tony hopes he wasn’t in the middle of a sentence.

 

The train bathroom smells like stale eggs and ammonia.  “Live fast, die young” is Sharpied onto the mirror.  Tony sits on the closed toilet for a while, turning his coat over and over in his hands.  He tries to shove as many minutes behind him as possible, but time seems even farther out of sync without the meter of Loki’s voice.  Tony tries counting, tries staring at the stopwatch on his phone.  The cold fluorescent light buzzes like sandpaper, whittling away at his nerves.  

His record for staying sober is five days, eleven hours, and eight minutes.  He made it after Pepper left, when he still thought there was hope of getting her back.  He knows he won’t beat it, because his hands packed two flasks of whiskey into his coat this morning—hands that moved with a dumb certainty miles away from his shoulders.  But he wants to come close.

Someone knocks on the door and it’s over.  Tony starts the sink, removes a flask, flicks it open.  The alcohol burns soft in his throat, like a candle in a window.

If Loki notices any change, he doesn’t mention it.  If he finds it strange that Tony returns to the bathroom four more times over the course of the three-hour ride, he doesn’t show it.  If he worries because Tony doesn’t respond immediately to questions, instead reeling himself back from a great distance or shaking his head like he’s trying to work something loose, the only sign he makes is that, whenever Tony’s in the car with him, he doesn’t take his hand off Tony’s knee.

By the time they reach Penn Station, time has turned satisfactorily  fuzzy at the edges and Tony’s ashamed enough at how important Loki’s touch has been as an anchor that he slips away into the station bathroom and starts on the second flask.

 

Tony hasn’t been to New York City since high school and he finds, as he leads Loki from Penn Station, that the city feels smaller than he remembers.  He reaches slightly too high for door handles, catches himself.  City blocks seem short, buildings lower.  The shwarma place he’d forced everyone to try after Senior Ball is much closer to the train station than he remembers.

He convinces Loki to try it and they hang their garment bags on the backs of their chairs. Tony grabs plastic cups to fill with room-temperature water from an aged cooler on a side table by the napkins.  When he returns, Loki’s thumbing at his phone.  He slips it back in his pocket as Tony sets his water down in front of him, careful not to spill.

“The state specialist got back to me yesterday,” Loki blurts.  Tony raises his eyebrows.  “He gave me the name of the adoption agency.”

“Yeah?” Tony says after a moment.  Loki reaches out and wipes a drop of water off the side of his glass.  

“I called them yesterday.”

“Oh?”  Somewhere, Tony’s hurt that he didn’t know this sooner.  But most of his attention is focused on not looking at the clock over the door.

“They said they could check my file and get back to me.  Apparently it’s up to my birth parents whether they allow the agency to furnish identifying information about them.”  

“Mm.”

Tony taps his foot under the table, tries not to count the number of times his heel slaps the floor.

Loki sighs heavily and wraps both hands around his glass.  “Look, Tony, of the two of us, I really think I have more of a right to be nervous.  I mean—you haven’t told me about your Christmas party thing, whatever that is, but I’ll bet you that it didn’t.  It didn’t.”  He swallows.  Shakes his head.

“Sorry,” Tony says.

The guy at the counter calls their number and he leaves to pick it up.

Loki pulls a bright orange prescription bottle out of his pocket and swallows a tablet dry before eating.  He grimaces, picks up the shwarma.  On any other day, Tony would tease him about how inelegantly he eats it.

 

“Have you ever been to New York before?” Tony asks when they’ve finished and Loki’s sucking determinedly at a mint.  Loki rolls the candy into his cheek.

“No.  I’ve been to Montreal before, but no other big cities besides Boston.”

“How’d you end up in Montreal?”

“Odin was visiting someone.  Business, I think.  Or an old friend from the war.  In any case, I was turned loose with Thor and—and Baldr to explore.  I was nine, I think.”

“Huh.”  There are four hours and forty-seven minutes in front of him and he needs to grasp them as tightly as he can.  “Well then, you’re one lucky guy, because I grew up on these mean streets and I can give you a tour.”  Loki grins, mint bulging in his cheek.  Tony grabs his hand and leads him toward the subway.

“My high school was up here,” he says when they pass the stop, ad posters blurring in bright smears on the walls; “There’s a great electronics store up there, or at least there used to be,” he adds a few stops later, “Run by this old Chinese guy.  You could get motherboards for unbelievably cheap.”

They get off just across the river in Brooklyn.  Tony drags Loki through the streets, chattering, watching him watch the skyscrapers with a kind of blank, rapt awe.  He takes him to the record store where he helped Steve build up his collection of Big Band albums, to the martial arts studio where Natasha spent over a thousand hours teaching to earn both her black belts and laid Tony into the mat the one time he came in for a lesson.  He kisses Loki at the center of the Brooklyn bridge: Loki tastes cold, like the winter that wraps around them.  A cyclist whistles at them and Loki laughs against Tony’s lips.

They detour through Central Park on the way back at Loki’s request, garment bags knocking against their legs, beating off the snow that’s started to stick to shoes and cuffs.  Loki stops every few yards to take pictures on his phone—of the scenery, of locals bundled in coats and scarves walking dogs, of the bright stripe of light from a streetlight on snow.  He takes a picture of the snowed-in amphitheater, then asks what it’s used for.  “Shakespeare in the park,” Tony replies as he knocks snow off his shoes.  “They do two different plays every summer.”  Loki smiles quick and bright and grabs Tony’s hand.

“We’ll have to come see one,” he says.

 

Tony changes into his tux in the bathroom of a McDonald’s four blocks from the Stark Industries Christmas Party.  His hands are shaking.  He drained the last of his flask before the train ride from Central Park and he can feel it starting to seep into his bones, a quiet, hazy languor.  A cuff link jumps out of his hands and into the sink.  He takes a breath.  Holds it.  His bow tie is a ligature.

Outside, Loki’s drawing patterns on a plastic table with the tip of his straw.  An empty package of fries in front of him.  “Your turn,” Tony says, throat dry.  Loki looks at him like Tony’s signed his death certificate.  Tony knows how he feels.

“You look nice,” Loki says, fear making his words empty.  They might be true.  But now, as they stand on the precipice, aesthetics don’t matter.

“Thanks,” Tony says anyway.

He forces himself to eat a cheeseburger while Loki changes because if he doesn’t eat now he won’t for at least eighteen hours.  And because there used to be a Tony who would eat Big Macs at three in the morning before finals, and that Tony was breezing through high school, through undergrad, and he was surrounded by people who were surviving with him and eating terrible fast food and the table was filled with laughter and spilled ketchup and ease.

Now, the burger tastes like cardboard and when Loki returns, he can’t tell if his stomach drops because of the way Loki saunters in his suit, like a slim strip of negative space, or because the last barrier between him and forced proximity to everything in life that he hates has fallen away.

“You look nice,” Tony says.  It’s as close to a battle cry as he can muster.

“Thanks,” Loki replies.

 

Stark Industries has rented out the entirety of a towering skyscraper in the heart of Manhattan. Tony stops outside it ostensibly to let Loki take it in.  They stand off to the side, near the edge of the sidewalk, and behind them town cars pull up to the valets.  Tony’s legs keep getting brushed by other people’s tailcoats.  Through the bright glass doors Tony can see tinsel adorning a minimalist Christmas tree—twisted metal like dead branches lit up with tiny LED’s.  A doorman gestures stiffly towards the elevators like a nutcracker placed there to chew walnuts and say, “Have a good evening, sir”.  

Tony lets the doorman take his coat, hopes the scarf and gloves he’d wrapped around his flasks—both empty now—are an adequate disguise.  Loki’s hands shake as he hands over his coat and Tony would take one but they’re in public now and someone has already put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Tony!”—over-exuberant, cheerful, transparent—and Tony is smiling and clapping this person—a man, mid-fifties probably, an executive almost certainly—on the back and shaking his hand and Loki has faded into the background behind him like a shadow.  He tries to reach back for him as he escapes but runs into a woman in a dress that sparkles like too many camera flashes instead, and she talks—“can’t wait to see you in the boardroom”—and he smiles, and looks just over her shoulder, trying not to squint.   She herds him into the elevator, telling him something about how this venue is so beautiful, isn’t it, and she’s been coming to these parties for decades now because she represents one of Stark Industries’ oldest partners and don’t they just get better every year.  The elevator smells like too much perfume and synthetic cinnamon.  Tony breathes through his mouth, tries to smile.

They’re spat out into a short hallway of smooth walls and sharp corners.  Tony hangs back, searching for Loki.  He’s there, at the back of the crowd.  Tony nods at him and Loki nods back, like a skydiver just before dropping away.  

The main hall is full of dark suits, glittering wrists, and loud, polite laughter.  All the trees around the perimeter are heavy with ornaments and lights, fake and dead.  People keep taking his hand, shaking it, clapping him on the shoulder.  He smiles and flirts and laughs, unable to hear what he’s saying because his mouth is a million miles away.  He becomes aware, after some time, that Loki is gone again; he tries to find him, but he has probably been burned away.

Eventually Tony squirms his way to a waiter carrying champagne.  He takes two glasses, waits until the man turns away before downing them both, then creeps towards a side table to set them down.  They don’t hit the table right, clink together with a sound that echoes around Tony’s head.  The room is bright around him: candlelight and crystal chandeliers, the whole place feeling like the inside of a lightbulb, pressurized and full of tiny particles whirling through a white-hot void.  He wants to hide, wants to curl up under one of the skeletal trees and bury himself in the empty gift boxes.

Instead, he tries to go outside.  Loki might be there, he thinks, pretending to smoke or take in the view.  He feels an ugly twisting in his gut: guilt, clawed and slick.  He’d left Loki totally alone, Loki who doesn’t know anyone here, who hates corporate Christmas parties for a better reason than Tony, who is a better  _ person _ than Tony because he decided to come anyway.

He passes the champagne waiter again, grabs two more glasses.  Feels the carbonation but doesn’t taste anything.

Someone taps him on the shoulder.  He whirls, watches as his hand with the glasses spins, in stop-motion, towards a face.  He manages to stop it, forcing it down by his side.  Smiles.  

“Tony,” the man says, in that grating semi-formal singsong, like a mockingbird, Tony thinks: the whole room full of mockingbirds with pecking beaks.  He shivers.  Realizes the man’s introduced himself and he’s meant to recognize him.  Nods like he does. “I haven’t seen you in years—when was the last time?  Must have been when your dad was still around.  We used to be close, your dad and I.  I worked with him on the vibranium project, trying to get better shielding for tanks and body armor.  Man was a genius, you know?  Tireless.  Always had ideas and most of ‘em worked.  The industry misses him like no other.”

Tony “Mm”s.  Tries to ignore the ringing in his ears, the sting of the light in his eyes.  Focuses on breathing, through his nose now, long, deep breaths.

“I heard you’re at MIT,” the man continues, and Tony focuses on hating his hair.  It’s short, perfectly blonde, coiffed.  All-American hair, Tony thinks.  Boy Scout hair.  “Must be doing some great work there, eh?  Always were your father’s son.”  The man chuckles.  “My own boy takes after me, too.  He’s about your age—I should introduce you two some time.  He’s just finishing his dissertation at George Washington University on public policy—something about the home front during World War Two.  Most of it goes over my head, to be honest.”  

Tony nods again, clenches his fists.  The dig of his fingernails into his palm reminds him that he’s solid, that for all he’s made of buzzing electrons and empty space, he is not actively dissociating into the air.

“Mr. Rogers!” Tony gulps, coughs when it gets stuck in his throat.  Obidiah is walking over, slow like an impending hurricane, arms splayed out.  The man turns and hugs him, many pats on the back.  Tony tries to edge along the wall and out of the door.

“Mr. Obidiah Stane,” Mr. Rogers is saying, and he’s gesturing back to Tony—what betrayal, though what could Tony expect from someone who was friends with his dad, mockingbirds all of them—“I was just telling Tony here about my son, Junior.  If Stark Industries ever needs a policy analyst, he’s your man.”

“I’m sure he is, Mr. Rogers, I’m sure he is.”  There’s a small circle of people between Tony and the nearest door, too large for him to sneak around.  Lacking escape, he looks around for a weapon.  A folding tray against the wall, packed with used champagne glasses.  He trades his two empties for a half full one, turns the lipstick stain away from him, sips. 

Mr. Rogers has been put aside now, and Obie’s approaching with no further obstructions.  “Good to see you, Tony.”  His voice is a siren, loud and warning.  Danger here.  Stay back.  “How ya doin’?”

“Great, Obie,” Tony manages, “Just great.”

“Good to hear it!”  The tray knocks into the backs of his thighs and Tony realizes he’s backed up.  He forces himself to stand up straight, to swirl his champagne a little in the glass.  “I hate to talk business at a party, but how’re those designs coming?  I still haven’t gotten any blueprints from you.”

Tony sips at the champagne.  

“Well get them to me as soon as you can, yeah?  Don’t want to disappoint people, you know?  Holidays are tough and we want to start off the new year strong.”  The hand at his back, inevitable, heavy.  He wonders if he can sink through the floor if he puts his mind to it.  “Speaking of, make sure you talk to Pepper tonight, huh, Tony?  I flew her out from California, so make sure she feels at home.  Any luck and she’ll be on management by the start of next quarter.”  Obie claps him on the back and the part of Tony that isn’t frozen solid is honestly surprised that he doesn’t shatter.

He becomes aware, after awhile, that he’s gasping, heaving, and has sloshed champagne over his shoes.  Carefully, he drains the glass.  Carefully, he sets it down.  It slips, worse than the other two, falls.  Breaks on the floor, one long crack.  He picks it up gingerly, places it back on the tray.  His finger red with blood from where he grasped the broken lip.

He wipes the blood on his pants.  More wells up.  He stares at it, transfixed, watching bits of himself escape.  Sticks his finger in his mouth before he remembers where he is and instead presses it against his leg.

The group of people has moved away from the door and he finally escapes onto the balcony, where he takes huge lungfuls of smoke-laden air and tries to make his head stop buzzing.

Someone is approaching him—not again, he can’t do this again, not now—dark and thin.  He realizes, when they take his hand and hold it gently, that it’s Loki, looking sick and pale and concerned.

“Loki,” he says.

“Hi.”  Loki looks around like a hunted fox.  “How are you?”  

“Bad,” Tony says, because maybe saying it will help.  It doesn’t.

“How much longer until we can leave?” 

“Uh—”

Loki’s watching him now, really looking at him.  Something in him softens and Tony suddenly wants to crawl away.  “Tony—”

“I’m fine—”

“Tony you’re not—”

“Really we can leave at any—”

“How much have you had to—”

“Here let’s go, now, let’s get out of here, blow this joint, jump on the express train to not-heresvi—”

“Tony  _ how many drinks _ —”

“Come on—”

“You can barely stand, I hardly think we’re going to—”

“Tony?”

Loki whirls, “Excuse us for a mom—”

“Hey, Pepper,” Tony says, because he has to, because she is there, framed in the doorway, with her hair floating behind her, backlit by the candles and the chandeliers so she looks like a fucking angel or something, perfect and put together and in this ivory evening gown that  _ caresses _ —not touches—caresses her hips and her legs.  He feels more than sees Loki draw away.  He feels like Icarus, wonders how people will react when he falls, burned and lumpy with hot wax, out of the sky.

“Tony!”  She says it with warmth, genuine warmth, and he’s stepping over, holding out his hands to her, and where she touches him it burns.  She leans in, gives him pecks on both cheeks.  He can tell from her eyes that she’s smelled the booze on him—she always could—but she leans toward him anyway.  “How are you?  I was starting to worry.”

Of course she was worried, she had to be worried, he’d dropped off the face of the fucking planet and she’d always been good, so good, at worrying about him.

“I’m volunteering at the Children’s Museum,” he says.

“Really?  That’s great, Tony, it really is.  I’m sure the kids are learning a lot.  Pepper Potts.”

“I know,” Tony almost says, but realizes she’s talking to Loki, that he’s answering—“Loki, just Loki”—that they’re shaking hands.  

“So you answered Obie’s call, then?” Tony says before he can stop himself.  Pepper turns back to him, frowning a little.

“I came because he invited me, yes.”  There’s a pause.

“And how are you liking New York?” Loki asks.  Pepper smiles again and everything is right.

“It’s great, living up to its reputation.  I’m only here for the party though; Obidiah’s putting me up in Boston for the week.”

“Oh?”  Loki says, which is good.  “And how’s that?”

“It’s nice to be back.  I went to graduate school at Harvard so it’s kind of like coming back home.”  

_ But it’s  _ not, Tony wants to scream,  _ It can’t be _ .  Because home used to be a one-bedroom apartment in a narrow brick building off Mt. Auburn Street with new, double-paned windows.  Obidiah had rented it for them, so it was too large, too grandiose, but Pepper had hung impressionist prints on the walls and Tony had made a drafting room out of the office and it had  _ worked _ .

“What, you’re too brilliant for Cali now?”  

They both stare at him, mouths slightly agape.

“I understand, Pepper, I do.  It must be hard being the best young exec, or secretary, or manager, or whatever it is that you do in Silicon Valley.”

She bridles at this, he can see it, he should stop now, he really should—

“I did not finish first in my MBA class to become a  _ secretary _ , Tony.”

He waves the comment away.  “Manager then.  Whatever.  Top dog.  Big cheese.  The woman in charge.”

“Silicon Valley is grabbing market share at unprecedented rates—”

“Yeah, isn’t that what I said?  Great place to work.  Great place to escape to.  You should stay there, keep your options open, you know, flooze around with all those assholes in T-shirts with ball pits in their offices or whatever that Generation Y bullshit is.  Boston’s too old school for you.  Too up its own ass.”

“Tony, I really think—”

“Why’d you come back, anyway?  Wasn’t it enough, leaving in the first place?”

“Tony I’ve come back because Obidiah has an offer for me that would positively influence my career.  And I miss our friendship, so I was hoping—”

“Oh I’ve been missing our friendship too, Pep.  A lot.  So much that I must have hallucinated and made up this  _ actual relationship _ that we had that I seem to remember lasting a few  _ years _ .”

Pepper’s lips are thin and red in her face.  Her eyes are big and bright, like stars.  She stalks off without a word, stiff, poised.

When he can see again, Loki’s staring at him with an ugly mix of concern and fear on his face.  “What was that about?” he asks softly.

Tony throws his arms out, smacks someone in the arm.  Doesn’t apologize.  He feels effervescent, like he’s bubbling away at the fringes.  There’s a tightness in his throat that will erupt either as laughter or tears.  “That,” he says, “Is Pepper fucking Potts.  Genius, woman, fucking brilliant, gonna be a fucking billionaire some day.  Or she would, if she didn’t sell out to Obidiah Stane, corporate leech of the century, not even a Stark and he’s CEO of Stark Industries, what the fuck is up with that.”  Tony trails off, looks around him.  His mouth is dry—he’s been talking, shouting maybe—and the balcony is emptying, fast, of everyone but him and Loki.  He catches the sleeve of a waiter as he passes, snags a glass of wine off his tray.  

Loki has his hands up, half reaching out to Tony, half in appeasement.  His eyes follow the glass up to Tony’s mouth.  “Tony, maybe we should leave now.”

“Why?” Tony spits, “Girl of the Century is in there being brilliant and fucking gorgeous, why not just stay and bask in her glory for a few more hours.”

“Tony, really, I think it’s time to go.  I think you’ve had enough.”

“Y’know what?  Yeah.  I  _ have _ had enough.”  He raises his voice now: the door’s still open, maybe someone inside will hear him.  “I’ve had enough of my own fucking company not being mine.  I’ve had enough of being given tasks to do like I’m a fucking  _ intern _ or some shit.  I am Tony Stark!  I am the son of Howard Stark and he was a genius, and I am a genius.  That’s what you all say, right?  Just like Dad.  Just like fucking old Daddy—”

Loki shuts the doors to the balcony gently, softly.  Waves a little apology to the people inside.  Tony shuts his mouth abruptly, opens it again.  Betrayed.  Loki glares at him, points at the glass in his hand.  “Tony I’m not trying to police you but—”

“Loki stop fucking patronizing me it’s annoying as fuc—”

“But you should probably stop drinking now.”

Tony takes a moment to place his glass carefully, precisely, in the center of an empty tray.

“And we also need to go.  Now.”

“That’s fucking clever, Loki-doki.  Nobody has ever had the genius to suggest such a thing to me before.”  He advances, pointing a wavering finger at Loki.  “How about I make you a deal, since you’re such a great genius.  How about this, you stupid, hot, stupid fuck.  How about this.  How about I stop drinking when my life stops being a steaming pile of all the shits that everyone I know has ever taken on me?  With a little extra shit from God or the Universe or what-the-fuck-ever.  Huh?  How the fuck about that?”

He leans forward, trying to get into Loki’s space.  He wants Loki to cower like he has been all evening, wants to see the same fear, the same hopelessness.  Wants him to be the dog in the cage, attacking himself.

“How about,” and Loki’s voice is low, his hands like stones on Tony’s shoulders, “We leave.”  He turns Tony around bodily and, one hand at his back, shoves him through the door, across the room, out into the elevator.  Tony tries to turn, tries to talk to him, but Loki jabs him in the back each time.  He pushes the button for the ground floor and stares at Tony until the elevator doors close, in case Tony tries to bolt.

The elevator still smells like synthetic cinnamon, and it’s almost enough to make Tony puke.

 

#

DAY 19

His mouth tastes like stale cotton. Even through his eyelids the light hurts.  Tony rolls over, feels blood settle at his temples.  

He becomes aware, distantly, of a quiet tapping, a rustling of sheets.  Someone else in the room, then.  He knows from the texture of the sheets that he isn’t at home.

“Morning sweetheart,” he hazards, pushing himself to his knees.  

“Morning it is, though barely.”  Loki sits on a double bed, legs under the duvet and laptop on his lap.  His hair is damp against the pillows.  “There’s water on the table.”

Tony blinks, glances at the nightstand.  A glass of water and two pills rest on a coaster on his side.  “Thanks,” he says, but doesn’t move.  There’s something about the way that Loki’s looking at him that’s making his stomach twist.  “I hope I didn’t make too much of an ass of myself last night.”

The laptop shuts with a quiet click.  Loki slides it carefully to the side before turning his entire body towards Tony.  He steeples his fingers and Tony’s reminded of all the supervillians and mafia bosses he’s ever seen in movies.

“You screamed at both your ex-girlfriend-slash-future-manager and the entire party separately.  You were belligerently drunk.  I had to all but carry you from the party to this stupid hotel room.  You vomited in the cab and on the curb outside.  You  _ abandoned me _ at the party and then I had to  _ take care of you _ and all I wanted was to be back in Boston.”

Tony has his head in his hands.  “I barely remember any of that.  The last thing I really recall is seeing Pepper and getting mad.  I don’t remember what I said at all.”  He slides his palms over his face, pulling at his skin.  “God, I fucked up.  I fucked up bad, didn’t I.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

Loki picks up his laptop again, opens it.  Starts typing once the screen has flicked back to life.

“What else did I do,” Tony asks deadly.  He takes a sip of water, lukewarm and tasting of too much fluoride.  On the other bed, Loki crosses his arms and huffs out a breath.

“You realized, around the time I started trying to push you into bed, that you were a terrible human being and attempted to, as you put it, ‘make it all up to me’.”

Tony winces.  “Oh God.”

“What followed,” Loki plows on, “Was the most lackluster hand job I have ever, and hopefully will ever, receive.  I think you tried to kiss me at one point and missed.  Terribly.”

“Did I at least get you off?”

Loki fixes him with a glare that could melt ice.  “Yes, you bastard.  Your relevant motor skills seemed remarkably unimpeded.”

“Well at least the evening wasn’t totally wasted then.”  Tony picks up one of the pills.  Advil.  He swallows it with another swig of water.  “Sorry I don’t remember that,” he adds, “I wish I did.”  He peers up at Loki from under his eyelashes, trying his best to look sultry when he feels like he tried to wrestle with a moving train.  “Can I make it up to you?”

It takes a few moments, but Loki smiles and shuts the laptop again.  “Not, I think, with another handjob.  I’d rather keep those off a tab, if you don’t mind.  You can buy me breakfast, though, and you can not mind that I booked the room and the taxi with your credit card.”

“Done.  Order whatever you want from room service, or we can go out, or whatever.  Completely up to you.”

“Shower first,” Loki replies, “And then take me out somewhere.  One of those tiny, pretentious coffee shops.  The ones that only serve fair trade, shade-grown Moroccan coffee and potato flour muffins.”

“Yes sir.  Whatever floats your weirdly hipster boat.”

 

When Tony returns, dressed and toweling aggressively at his hair, Loki is bent over the laptop again, scrolling intently through lots of closely-packed text.  Tony drops the towel on his bed and settles beside Loki, propping his head on his shoulder and wrapping his arms around his waist.  “Whatcha reading?” he asks.

Loki stiffens briefly before leaning back into Tony.  “I’ll tell you at breakfast.  I’m starving.”

  
  


They end up in Central Park, Loki tugging on Tony’s hand and leading him back to the amphitheater.  It had snowed in the night—the occasional flurry still tumbles down to cling to the trees—so they stand, Loki on the stage and Tony on the first row of seats, and eat their gluten free bagels, waxed paper takeaway bags crinkling in the cold.  The close silence of snowfall presses in around them.

Loki is graceful, Tony notices through his headache, through the clamor of things he is Not Thinking About, and he is very far away.  

Eventually, the bagels are gone and the coffee is too.  Tony’s reminded of those early nights on the bridge, freezing and swollen, both of them on a precipice, counterbalanced, like the two arms of a tightrope walker.  As he watches, Loki folds his bag neatly and slips it into his empty coffee cup.  He places the cup at his feet and steps forward like a curtain has been raised.

“O,” he intones, “That this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew.”  A pause.  He twirls his hand like he’s waiting for someone to finish talking.  “How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t! O fie!”  A vicious kick: snow sprays off the stage into Tony’s lap.  “Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.  That it should come to this!”

His voice doesn’t echo, but it should.  He stands on the stage, hands clenched at his sides, breath in panted clouds that obscure his face.  

“To be or not to be,” Tony offers.  Loki blinks, chuckles, jumps off the stage and settles next to him.

“That’s the problem with Hamlet, you know,” he says, sticking his hands in his pockets.

“What?”

“He lacks conviction.  All this going on about ‘to be or not to be,’ always needing more proof, more plans before he can go out and kill Claudius.  That’s why everyone dies.  Because Hamlet couldn’t decide whether Claudius should die, or if  _ he _ should.”

Tony turns his cup around in his hands, unsure what to say.  It’s a plain cup, no corporate logo, corrugated cardboard over waxed paper derivative.  “100% ORGANIC!” is printed on the seam, probably in sustainably manufactured soy ink.

“I heard back from the adoption agency again.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”  Loki kicks the snow again, driving a heel into the ground until sand clings, damp, to his shoe.  “I know little of any use.  No names.”  Another kick.  “No addresses—not even old ones.  Not a chance of a phone number.”  He runs his hands over his face slowly, pressing so hard that his cold-flushed cheeks go white.  “What is so despicable about me that my parents refuse to associate with me?  Or what is so terrible about  _ them _ ?”  He collapses dramatically, buries his face in his knees.  “They’re probably doing something terrible to indigenous populations somewhere, too embarrassed to show their faces.”

“What? Why indigenous populations?”  Tony eases himself to sit next to Loki.  The ground is wet and he tries to ignore how the cold seeps in through his pants.  Loki, meanwhile, tosses his hair back, stares at the sky.  Tony watches a small smile ease its way across his face, gone before he speaks.

“My mother,” he says slowly, like he’s savoring the feel of the words, “Is a Latvian and a carrier for Haemophilia A.  She has had some higher education.  My father is French and has been exposed to malaria.  He has had no education past sixteen years old.”

Tony leans his head on Loki’s shoulder.  Loki jumps; Tony feels him shift, lean away so he can look down at him.  “You’re lucky,” Tony explains quietly.  “Haemophilia’s sex-linked.  As in, inherited through X and Y chromosomes, not, like, linked to having sex.  It would be weird for me to imply you’d been having sex with your mom.  Especially since you don’t know her.”

Loki chuckles, shaking Tony’s head, which throbs.  He pulls away, grabbing Loki’s hands.  “Seriously though.  If you’d inherited it from your mom you would’ve needed all sorts of treatment and shit—pills to take, I think.  Forever.  The condition stops your blood from clotting unless you take meds.  Any cut could’ve killed you.”

Loki tilts his head, appearing to consider this.

“So then a razor would’ve been a surer bet than the bridge?”  

Tony tackles him, pushing him backwards.  “Fucking—” Loki falls, arms flailing, tries to push Tony off.  Tony doesn’t budge, legs splayed over Loki’s waist, wriggling his nose into the collar of Loki’s coat.

“Shi—Tony that’s cold—”

Tony cuts him off with a kiss.

 

Some time later, when the snow has them both cold enough to shiver, they start to wander out of the park.  “Seriously though,” Tony says, blowing into his hands before stuffing them in his pockets, “Latvian and French, Haemophilia A and malaria.  Your dad’s been to the tropics ever, we know that.”

“Not much else though,” Loki replies bitterly.  “And since neither of them graduated from college means I can’t search alumni lists.”

“From the sound of it they wouldn’t have told you which colleges they went to anyway, or when, so that wouldn’t have helped much anyway.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m just trying to be practical.  Haemophilia may be more common in some nationalities than others, I can check that maybe.”

“I already know her nationality.  Latvian.”

“Right.  Duh.”

They walk for awhile in silence, passing out of Central Park and into the streets, the thudding of studded tires like a ticking clock beside them.  Tony turns them toward the East River, away from the hotel.

“Sorry, Lokes.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Yeah, but sorry can also mean I’m expressing sympathy or whatever.”

More silence.  They pass stone-and-brick apartment buildings with taxis waiting at the doorsteps.  Exhaust puffs into the cold air.

“Do you know if you were born in America?”

“I wasn’t, I don’t think.  I seem to remember going to get a lot of shots one time and having it explained that they were things I didn’t get when I was a baby because I wasn’t born here.”

“Great!  Awesome.  That’s helpful.”

“In the name of God why?”

“Well, it’s one country off the list, right?”

“Not in the least.  They could have immigrated later.”

“Maybe.  But say they didn’t.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

“Tony,  _ why? _ It’s illogical.”

“But say they didn’t.  Say they dumped you here so you could have a better life or whatever and then absconded back to wherever they were living at the time?”

“Did you just use the word ‘absconded’?”

“Yes.  It’s a good word.  You should try it sometime.”

“Look, even  _ if _ they actually came here to drop me off—I remind you that international adoption agencies are a  _ thing _ and I could have been picked up by Odin or Frigga wherever they were.  But  _ if _ they came to America, that is, if anything, more grounds for them to  _ stay _ .”

“What if they got deported?”

“So what if they did? Tony, I’ll ask you again,  _ why do you care so much _ ?”

Tony gets himself in front of Loki and stops, forcing Loki to stop with him.

“First off, I care so much because I care about  _ you _ and you care a lot about finding out who your parents are.  Second off—” he stops, fidgets.  Tries to think of a way to say this that isn’t completely, grovelingly pathetic.  “Second off, I don’t think I can take going back to Boston.  I fucked up the party and Obidiah might actually kill me.  He’s powerful enough, he could probably actually hire hit men or something to take me out on the train.  So what if we went to France.  Or Latvia.  And we worked under the assumption that your parents still live in whichever one we choose, and we see what happens.  Huh?”  Loki’s looking at him like he’s a child missing a hand: tiny and pitiful.  “Christmas in Paris, can you imagine it?  With the Eiffel Tower all lit up and everything?  You wouldn’t have to pay for anything, I promise, and you wouldn’t owe me anything either.”

“Tony,” Loki says, in a voice soft like ripped satin, “We don’t have our passports or any clothes.  We’ll have to go back to Boston anyway.  Trust me, I’d rather get all my teeth pulled with the back end of a hammer.”  He cups Tony’s cheek with a cold hand.  Tony claps his own hand over it, holding Loki there.  “We’ll make it.  Maybe.  And if you want to plan some elaborate getaway—” he leans in, kisses soft, cold, quick, “I probably won’t say no.”

 

When they get back to the hotel room, Tony pins Loki to the wall next to the bed and kisses him hard.  Loki gasps into his mouth, head thunking against the wall.  “Tony, what—”  His hands around Tony’s back, delicate, fluttering, halfway between grasping and pushing away.

“Let me give you this.”  Tony speaks it to Loki’s lips, pecking at the corners of his mouth.  “Let me remember this.”

And Loki is nodding, and sighing, and tugging Tony closer, fingers in his belt loops, threading through his hair.  Tony slides Loki’s jacket down his shoulders; it catches at his elbows.  Undoes the top two buttons of his shirt.  Loki’s breath catches, stutters out against Tony’s cheek.  It’s warm, smells of coffee and bread.  Tony slides a hand down Loki’s neck, traces the tendons there.  Lets his fingers catch briefly on his adams apple, dip into the hollow above his clavicle.  Loki draws back a little to watch him.  Tony continues, opening another button as he goes.  He can feel Loki’s ribs under his skin, the swell and ebb of his breath.  The flutter of his heart as he presses his hand to Loki’s chest.  He closes his eyes, counting the beats in his head.  And-one.  And-two.  And-three.  He could wait here forever, feeling Loki’s heart beat against him, packaging time into tiny boxes wrapped in string, a line of gifts.  

Loki catches his mouth, firm, biting.  His grip on Tony’s hair tightens until it hurts; Tony gasps and Loki swallows it, breathes back a groan.

“What will you do?” he asks.

“What do you want?”  Tony replies.

Loki’s fingers come up to his cheeks and Tony thinks of the lines of a cable-stay bridge, thinks of concrete and steel and other unshakable things.  Loki traces over Tony’s lips, his cheeks, down to his throat.  His eyes are fast and skittish, his breath short.  He swallows, once, twice, and Tony watches the tremble in his neck.

“I want you to.  To suck me off.”  

Tony’s mouth goes dry.  He nods.  He keeps nodding.  He thinks he possibly nods too much, that maybe he should stop nodding.

He kisses Loki again, and that stops him.

Loki reaches for the lapels of Tony’s coat and Tony lets him slide it off of him.  It drops to the floor and Tony takes care to kick it out of the way.  He tugs Loki’s belt open, slides his shirt out of his pants.  Runs his hands up Loki’s stomach before settling at his hips, squeezing just a little.  Loki is thin—Tony knew this—but here, like this, feeling the jut of bone under skin, the taut flesh of his stomach—not muscled—the dips between his ribs, Tony can measure the space that Loki takes up with the pads of his fingers.  He’d forgotten what it felt like to map another person.  Pepper was so long ago and since then, he’d taken care to touch his lovers in as few places as possible.  He couldn’t shake the feeling that people were a little like unfired clay, and he didn’t want to leave any impressions.

But Loki is like casted glass, easier to shatter than to misshape.  Tony leans in and kisses his sternum, running his tongue over its curious, subtle topography.  Loki gasps sharply, bucking up.  Tony slips a hand around the small of his back and nests his fingers between the hummocks of Loki’s vertebrae.  He runs his tongue up Loki’s neck and sucks lightly above his fluttering pulse. Maybe this is a form of forever, a moment of such depth that it creates its own gravity; maybe he and Loki are orbiting a superconcentrated mass of feeling or emotion or experience.  Loki makes a noise that’s more pant than moan and tugs at Tony’s shirt.

Tony lets him press him to his knees.  Loki stands above him, shirtless, wild, a cacophony of cartography with dark shadows under his ribs and the tops of his shoulders bathed in light.  He pushes the loose ends of his belt aside, flips open the button of his jeans, draws down the zipper.  Tony waits as Loki takes a shuddering breath, shuts his eyes tight, and slides his jeans and boxers down.  They catch around his knees, Tony thinks, but he’s much more focused on the shaky way Loki runs his hands back up his thighs and wraps one around the base of his dick.  His breath hitches and he groans, long and low and needy, and Tony almost comes apart right there.  Loki keeps one hand on himself, stroking slowly and lightly, fingers slipping around his head and slit in small circles that Tony can’t stop watching—the other reaches out, cups Tony’s chin, runs over his cheek and his lips, which he opens; he takes Loki’s fingers into his mouth and sucks lightly.  There are no calluses on Loki’s fingertips.

Eventually Loki draws his fingers away and guides Tony down, forward.  His hands ghost over Tony’s cheeks. 

Tony is tentative and gentle, holding Loki in place with his hands.  Loki’s cock is thin and long, not quite hard.  Tony licks along it, trying to imitate the way Loki had touched himself.  He sucks a little on the head, hears a thunk as Loki’s head hits the wall.

“Tony,” he groans.

“Loki,” Tony mutters against him.  It comes out shaky and soft.  He shuts his eyes and swallows Loki down by feel.  Maybe this way he can be just another guy with just another dick, not someone who makes Tony pay attention in a way that he hasn’t since he was six years old and first discovered  _ math _ , first learned that something that existed inside of his head could so perfectly describe everything outside of it.

But Loki insists on talking as Tony swirls his tongue around him, a quiet, broken litany of “oh god” and “yes” and “Tony more please oh, oh, oh god I— I can—I can’t” and Tony wraps his hands around Loki’s ass and pulls him closer, lifting his hips off the wall and Loki is completely hard now, Tony can feel it, heavy in his mouth, salty taste of precome dribbling down Tony’s throat.

Tony’s erection is straining against his pants and he wants desperately to touch himself, but this right now is about Loki not him and to divert any of his attention feels cheap and wrong.

Loki’s thrusting shallowly into his mouth now, fingers slack on Tony’s cheeks, pressing just hard enough that he can probably feel himself through Tony’s mouth.  Tony opens his eyes and finds Loki staring at him like he can’t quite believe Tony’s real.  Tony slides off of him slowly, licks his lips.  Loki shudders, gulps.  “Are you close?” Tony asks, pitching his voice low.  Loki nods vigorously, stroking Tony’s cheeks.  “Do you want to come in my mouth?”  Loki shuts his eyes, lips trembling.

“Yes,” he whispers.

Tony grins, wide and reckless, and takes Loki down again.  He keeps one hand on Loki’s hip, trails the other down between his legs, stroking at his thighs.  When he’s got Loki breathing hard again, and his hands are clutching at Tony’s shoulders, and his legs are shaking, Tony reaches down to cup his balls, squeezing just a little.  Loki’s head hits the wall again: his eyes close, mouth drops open.  He groans, long and low, like an earthquake.  Tony can feel him go taut.

With a flick of Tony’s tongue Loki comes undone.  He shudders and shakes and mewls, curling over Tony to pant hot, wet breaths into his hair.  Tony swallows all he can before pulling off, panting, letting the rest dribble down his chin.  Loki sags backwards, sliding down the wall until he’s sitting with his legs splayed around Tony.  His eyes are glassy, his cheeks flushed.  Tony touches them, feeling the heat of pumping blood, the solidity of bone.  Loki leans in as if he’s about to kiss him, but stops short, eyes flicking over Tony’s mouth and chin and cheeks.  He reaches out almost reverently, skating a thumb through a trail of cum and smearing it over Tony’s jaw line.  Tony tilts his head back to let him.  Loki’s hand is smooth against his stubbly face and he thinks of silica, how time and pressure smooth something’s jagged edges.  The Greeks, he remembers, thought that texture came from the shape of a thing’s atoms: that rough things were rough because of some immutable quality of their nature.  How in actual fact soft and smooth objects were only so because they had shrunk the peaks and valleys of their raggedness.

Eventually Loki does kiss him, all soft lips and warmth.  Tony rocks forward, moaning into the contact, trying to press as much of himself against as much of Loki as he can.  He grinds against Loki’s torso, gasps.  “Oh,” Loki says quietly.  He leans back a little, hands on Tony’s shoulders.  “I’d…you’re…”

“You wanna help with it?”

Loki looks away.  His hands drop from Tony’s shoulders and twist together in his lap.

“Hey,”  Tony says softly, “You don’t have to.  Promise.  I can excuse myself to the bathroom if you want.”  He wants Loki’s hands on him, he  _ does _ , but Loki is like casted glass and Tony’s damned if he’s going to break him.

“You don’t have to leave,” Loki mutters, and he looks so lost, so pleading.  Tony kisses him quick, gentle.  

“You wanna watch?”

Loki nods.

Tony gets up and grabs a box of tissues from the bedside table.  While he’s up, he shucks his pants and underwear and socks.  He returns to kneel between Loki’s legs, naked and hard.  He watches Loki watch him as he grips himself and starts stroking.  He tries to keep it slow, to give Loki a nice long look, but the way Loki’s watching him like he can  _ see _ him, like Tony is in such sharp focus he’s granular, that if Loki wanted he could run his fingers through the edge between Tony and the rest of the universe, is making his gut tighten and his cock twitch, but he still wants to give Loki a show, so he leans back on his heels, licks two fingers and slides them down to his ass, imagining they’re Loki’s, long and dexterous, and he stares at Loki’s fingers, tight on his knees, remembers how they’d looked like broken birds in the hospital, feels them cool inside him as he slips one of his in, and Loki’s eyes go wide, and his mouth falls open, and Tony stops stroking himself to pull Loki into a kiss, and when Loki deepens it thrusts his finger in time with Loki’s tongue, and when he moans he’s pretty sure the entire hotel shakes a little bit.  Loki whimpers when Tony bites his lip, his arms are on Tony’s hips, lifting him up, and Tony slides a second finger into his ass as he puts his other hand back on his cock, “Fuck!”, and he’s leaning in to bite at Loki’s neck and suck bruises around the hollow of his collarbone, and Loki’s laid a hand on Tony’s wrist so he can feel the way Tony’s tendons flex with his fingers, and his other hand is sliding up and down Tony’s thigh, and Tony feels his touch like fire, like light, and he tightens his hand on his cock and crooks his fingers in his ass and Loki, somehow, gets his teeth into Tony’s shoulder and with another jerk, another thrust, Tony’s gone.

He sits back when he’s done, still breathless.  There’s a splash of come on Loki’s stomach, some on the floor.  “Sorry,” he says, reaching for the tissues.  “I’ll clean up.”

“Wait,” Loki says, and he takes Tony’s hand, swoops it through the come on his skin and lifts it to his face.  He licks each of Tony’s fingers slowly, carefully, before releasing his hand.  “Now may I please have a tissue?” he asks, sounding oddly shy.

“Fuck,” Tony says reverently, handing one over.

 

Despite them both feeling boneless and sleepy, and several hours having passed since checkout time, Loki still insists they leave for Boston that day.  Tony tries to ply him with stories about New York, sales pitches about where Tony can take him and what they can see; with sex; with the honest-to-God truth that he’s fucking terrified about going back where Pepper or Obidiah might find him.  Loki replies that they have the perfect cover: since they have another night booked at the hotel, nobody in Boston will be expecting them back.  He doesn’t say that he’s scared of Odin, but Tony can see it in the way his fingers clench, how he won’t look Tony in the eye.  So Tony agrees and tries to see Boston as anything but the sucking maw that it feels like.  They pack what little they’ve brought with them and Tony books them two train tickets from his phone while Loki checks the room for any stray belongings.  He tells the front desk that they’ll be out late and that they shouldn’t forward any calls for him.

Tony stops at an ATM on their way to the train station and withdraws enough money to puff out the night deposit envelope he stuffs it into.  Loki raises his eyebrows but Tony just laces their fingers together and pulls him down the street.  He thinks, as they order falafel from a street vendor, that Loki may have been kidding about wanting to come away with him after they get back to Boston—or may have said so to placate him—but he figures he’ll just have to sell it better than he sold staying in New York.  What “it” is he doesn’t exactly know yet, but it definitely involves the international terminal at Logan and enough clothes for several weeks.  He feels like a fugitive, trying to sneak back into his life without his demons catching him, then fleeing to another country where he can seek, what, psychological asylum?  Protection from people whose only crime against him was looking out for his best interests?  The falafel tastes like ash in his mouth, but Loki smiles a little whenever he catches Tony watching him, so Tony does his best to smile back.

It gets harder the closer they get to the station.  Tony finds himself counting blocks, then steps, then seconds; he drags Loki in detours, turning them down alleys to steal kisses like he might lose himself in them.  He realizes his hands are sweating when Loki lets go to wipe his own hand on his pant leg, which makes Tony want to apologize, grab his hand back, and crawl under a rock and die.  He notices that Loki speeds up when they pass a liquor store at the same time he notices he strays towards them.  This he does apologize for, shamefaced and humble.  Loki smiles at him, a small, pitying smile.  It hurts almost as much as seeing Pepper had.  He remembers Maria looking at him like that—like she was watching him through a window, distant and serene and sad—from the hospital bed they’d set up in the living room.  

He doesn’t realize, until Loki pushes a paper ticket into his hand—bluish, text in block capitals, numbers and words he doesn’t really parse—that they’re at the station.  He sits heavily on the first bench he sees, turning the ticket over and over in his hands.  He hears Loki sit next to him, creaking the bench, and shuts his eyes.  He should probably apologize again.  He doesn’t remember walking the last few blocks, or being asked to pay for his train ticket.  Loki must have been trying to get his attention for at least ten minutes.  Maybe longer.  Probably longer.  

Down the hallway from Maria’s bed had been a door—the biggest, heaviest door in the entire house; a door that nine-year-old Tony had never been able to open.  He’d stood there and pounded on it, screamed and cried, shouted; and not once had Howard opened it.  

It had been the butler, Jarvis, who had finally dragged Tony away, who had petted his hair and explained that maybe the battery was dead in the heart monitor and he would call the doctor right away.

The door had finally opened an hour later, but Tony hadn’t seen it.  He’d heard Jarvis speaking in hushed tones and had shrunk away from the shadow that preceded Howard into the living room.  He remembers the dull thunk of the bottle when Howard set it on the floor, how he stared at the liquid in it as it rocked, back and forth, back and forth, in a weak shaft of sun.  How Howard had stood again, after fiddling with something by the bed, and left, never once looking at Tony.  He’d chucked the RC drone Tony’d been playing with at him first; it barely missed Tony’s head.

Someone jostles him: Loki, Loki pinched, Loki worried, Loki looking like Tony had felt when he banged long and hard on Howard’s door.  

He falls asleep on the train.  When he wakes and feels it still moving, he pretends with all his might that he hasn’t.


	3. Running is a Strong Word

DAY 21

Part of the benefit of having a top-floor apartment is the view.  Tony’s building is new, finished in the last few months before the recession hit, when glass-and-steel towers were thrown up around the country like contemporary art monuments to prosperity.  Being Boston, his is glass and steel and brick, but it’s still taller than anything in the surrounding blocks, so Tony’s always been able to look out over the skyline, watching the irregular geometry of the city, the deep linear shadows on the streets, the whole fading into what little he can see of the curvature of the Earth.  Today it means that he’s too high up to see anyone else’s Christmas trees.

He stands in front of the closed glass doors to the balcony, feeling the cold radiate through the glass.  His palms make clouds of condensation as they fight coming to thermal equilibrium with the surface.  Life: the collective refusal of organized matter to succumb to the probabilistic trends of the Universe.  Turning everything around it to chaos in a desperate attempt not to become chaos itself.

It had snowed during the night.  Wet, cloying snow that soaked into stone and left a slushy brown mess on the streets.  He’d gotten home shortly before it started, having left Loki—at his own insistence—at the train station to catch a taxi.  

The bus ride home had been short, cold, and lonely.  He’d realized, belatedly, that maybe he shouldn’t have left Loki alone; he should have stayed with him until his taxi came, made sure he got in it, made sure he gave the driver his home address and not some street in the middle of nowhere, next to easily accessible nothingness.  He’s sure if he’d done so that Loki would have said something about how he’s not a  _ child _ , Tony, he can get home by himself—but it would have been worth it to take a little of the weight off of Loki’s shoulders.

As it was, he’d texted him from the bus, a hurried “ _ lmk you get home ok, _ ” and, as he was pulling his shoes off and falling, literally, into bed, he’d received “ _ the prodigal son returned _ ”.

The storm had warmed some during the night, some current of warm air pushing itself into the upper troposphere, turning the snow to angry, dull sleet.  It clatters against the window, runs down the glass and Tony imagines for a moment that it’s his fingers making it, like some aliens he’d seen in  _ Doctor Who _ , who said that water waits, water is patient, water will outlast you.  He thinks about erosion, about dissolution, about solid objects being picked apart, molecule by molecule, until nothing visible remains.

His phone informs him that it’s 11:44am on Christmas Eve.  It’s unseasonably warm.  Apple stock is up four points; Stark Industries down twenty five.  Twenty-five points.  He wonders idly what it must have been the day after the Christmas party.

The cabinets are empty, so he folds himself into his jacket, pockets his keys, and heads downstairs.  Sleet smacks him in the face when he gets outside and he hauls his jacket over his head as he jogs toward the nearest convenience store.  It’s a couple blocks away—Tony’s neighborhood is predominantly home to chic hipster cafes and upscale bike shops and independent book stores—but it’s warm and dry and lit by gently flickering fluorescent lights.  Top 40 Christmas songs play ambiently.  He grabs a basket at the door and makes a beeline for the liquor.  The sole salesperson raises an artfully pierced eyebrow at him as he approaches.  “How can I help you, sir?” she asks, with all the ennui of working a minimum-wage job alone on Christmas Eve.

Tony scans the shelves, which are pretty picked over.  He selects a whiskey of reasonable volume and has her pull two of them.  “Going to a party?” she asks.  

“Yeah,” he says, shifting awkwardly foot-to-foot, “One of those pot-luck deals with friends, big affair, lots of homeliness.  Home-baked pies kind of thing.”

“Mmm,” she replies, handing him the bottles, “You should bring some, like, fruitcake or something.  There’s one on the shelves—with the reindeer on it?  It’s really good.  Tastes like your grandma made it or whatever.”  She raises her eyebrows meaningfully at him.  

“Good idea.”

He grabs two of the fruit cakes to match the liquor and lets her stick bows onto everything as she bags it.  “Merry Christmas,” she tells him.

“You too,” he remembers to reply.

Outside the sleet is coming down heavier so he stuffs his bag under his coat.  He trudges past shops shuttered early for the holiday and against the lashing weather.  The only place that looks open is an upscale Chinese place, red and gold gilt dragons in the windows and swans on a folding screen behind the door.  A bell over the door tinkles as Tony passes, wafting warm air smelling of dough and sesame oil after him.  Briefly, he considers stopping.  Considers going inside, tucking his bag underneath a table for two and ordering the lunch special, whatever that is, and warming himself with green tea.  People would probably recognize him though—Stark Industries has to have been on the news—and sitting alone in a restaurant on Christmas Eve is somehow impossible, like having a conversation with someone in a foreign language is impossible.  He would have no idea what to do.  Where to put his hands.  He’s been holed up in the lab and his apartment and his own head so long he’s forgotten the subtle discourse of public life.

The door shuts, cutting off the warmth and the scent of food and the friendly murmur of low conversation.  The bell tinkles again.  

“Tony?”

Tony freezes.  That voice is sunlight so hot it burns, a prism refracting Tony in all his pieces.  This is not something he can deal with right now.  “Tony, are you OK?”

He turns around.  “Hey, Pepper.”

She’s standing, one hand still on the door handle, a plastic bag of stacked takeout containers dangling from the other.  Her coat is sleek, well-tailored, black.  Her hair a halo in the warm light of the restaurant.  Her mouth open slightly, soft, without lipstick.  She takes a half step forward and Tony feels himself flinch away.  “I didn’t know you were back in Boston.  Obidiah has been trying to contact you for days.”

Tony winces, fidgets with his bag under his coat.  “He doesn’t need to know everything,” he mutters.

Pepper’s face slides from concern to pity.  “Where are you off to in this weather?  Your coat’s open, you must be freezing.”

“Oh, y’know,” He glances at the street, the overhang, the sidewalk.  “Home.  Probably.  Got stuff to do, projects, work.  Being gone a few days puts you really behind.  Um.”

“Tony it’s Christmas Eve, come have lunch with me.”  She raises the bag of food invitingly.  “I’ve got plenty of food.”

“No, it’s fine Pep, I really have to—”

“My car’s around the corner.  Come on.”

She puts an arm around his back and he starts walking, sinking into her orbit like a stray comet.  She smells almost exactly as he remembers: nutty, a little like vanilla, overlaid here with the sooty smell of city rain.  He marvels that three moves across the country hasn’t changed her body wash.  

Pepper leads him to a small, sleek sedan parked down the block.  She nestles the takeout on the floor of the backseat as Tony slumps into the passenger seat.  He tries to shove his bag around to his right side before she can notice, but she nods at the bulge under his coat as she starts the engine.  “Were you doing some last-minute Christmas shopping?” 

“Something like that.”

They drive through the city in silence, down toward campus and out over the river.  Tony stares out the window at the bridge where he met Loki, watching the streetlights like dissolving stars on the water.  

“Tony?”  Pepper asks softly, and Tony wonders what she can see of the tense set of his shoulders.

“Pepper?” he parrots, call-and-response, like he used to do when she left in the mornings, when she got home after class, when she came to fetch him after he’d spent too many hours in his workshop.     

 

Pepper drives him to an apartment in the heart of Cambridge: red brick walls, hardwood floors, in a neighborhood more likely to be inhabited by professors than students.  It has big windows behind thick, velvet curtains in dark maroon and slim, minimalist furniture in mahogany.  Tony wonders, as he rests his jacket on the arm of a dark leather couch with light blue accented throw pillows, how big she’d made Obidiah make her signing bonus.  Pepper herself bustles into the kitchen, leaving Tony to sit awkwardly on the couch.

“Coffee?” she calls. 

“Sure.”

“Regular or espresso?”

“Regular.  Black.  You’ve sure got a nice place here.”

He hears the aggressive hiss of an electric kettle.  “Thanks,” Pepper says, leaning on the doorframe between the living room and kitchen.  “Obidiah offered me a place by Strawberry Hill but I turned it down.”  

Tony makes a strangled noise he hopes sounds mostly like a noncommittal “Mmm”.  Pepper doesn’t appear to notice: she surveys her kingdom, smiling slightly.  

“It’s very different not being a graduate student anymore.”  The kettle clicks and she disappears back into the kitchen.  Tony stuffs a throw pillow onto his lap and runs his hands over the embroidery—tone-on-tone, texture more than pattern, subtle complexity like the way Pepper’s face folds into a smile—and wonders how the world picks people to snatch up and change, how it happens so easily for her and so rarely for him.  He thinks about seeds that shape themselves like whirligigs so the wind can more easily catch them.  

Pepper returns with two mugs and folds herself elegantly onto the other end of the couch.  Tony takes the cup she proffers and immediately puts it down on the coffee table.  Pepper hands him a coaster pointedly.  “How’re you doing, Tony?” she asks.  Her hands are wrapped around her mug like the spiraled twigs of a bird’s nest.  Golden ratios interwoven into care.  Tony scrubs his hands over his face.  Her apartment is warm and he feels a little like he’s dissolving into it.

“‘M fine, really.  Building robots, writing papers, that kind of thing.  Life of science and all that.  The Christmas party was an off night.”  He realizes he’s shaking his leg.  Stops.  Lets it start up again when she doesn’t answer.  “What about you, huh?  You’ve got a great spread, I said that already, but seriously this is fantastic, all neo-chic hipster intellectual.  Fantastic.  Way better than that hovel we lived in, am I right?  I bet this place is, like, LEED certified to the max too, you’ve got compact fluorescent bulbs and, what is this, reclaimed bamboo flooring?  Very green of you, well done.”

“Tony,” Pepper says, like she’s  _ always _ said it, in this perfectly soft-and-hard tone that Tony can’t help but listen to.  “I didn’t invite you over to talk about my house.”  She smiles over her mug and takes a small, elegant sip.  “I haven’t heard from you since graduation.  How  _ are you _ ?  What are you doing?  Who was the boy you brought to the dance?”

“Great questions, Pep.  A-plus.  D’you mind if we discuss over takeout?  It’s, what, two now?  Anyway, I’m kind of hungry.”

He follows her like a lost puppy into the kitchen, obediently grabs plates and bowls to bring back to the living room.  She follows with the bags of food, which she places on the table before setting a pair of disposable wooden chopsticks on each plate.

“Peking duck,” she says, pointing.  “Won ton soup.  Shrimp lo mein and white rice.”

“Sounds fantastic,” Tony says, standing to reach for the duck.  When he sits his jacket slides towards him, hidden bottles clinking together.

Pepper looks up from spooning rice onto her plate, looks from Tony’s jacket to his face, frozen in something that feels an awful lot like guilt and terror.  He tries to swallow and simultaneously relax his jaw.  Neither really works.  Pepper finishes spooning out rice and gestures for the duck.  Tony passes it over without taking any.  He’s been caught, he’s sure of it.  He wishes he could say something to make it better, but he’s failed her on a fundamental level, again, and short of unmaking himself there’s no way he can right his wrongs.

“I want to make something very clear.  Right here, right now.”  

Tony nods, feeling his pulse hard and fast in his wrists.

“I still care about you a great deal, Tony.  Probably I always will.  But I cannot take care of you.  Just because I’m back in Boston does not mean that I’m here to clean up your messes, no matter what Obidiah implies.  And I won’t do this—having you over for lunch, spending time with you socially—if you’re expecting that.  Because I can’t give that to you and I can’t pretend that I can.  I’ll just let both of us down.”

“I don’t expect that, Pep.”  He clears his throat.  Grabs the rice to have something to do with his hands.

“Good.  I also want you to understand that I still need to know what’s going on with you because I need to know what I can expect from you.”

Tony nods again.  Tears or anger or maybe both are thick in his throat.  He feels like he’s at the bottom of a well, staring up, damp and cold, at Pepper’s distant face.

“I know you’re drinking again,” Pepper says, and it’s like what he imagines being shot would feel like.  “I need to know for how long.”  She takes a bite of duck.  

Tony hates her.  Hates her for being put together, poised; for having the freedom to leave Boston and return without feeling like a fugitive, for being able to go out and buy food on Christmas Eve instead of buying whiskey  because it felt necessary and getting sad, convenience store fruit cake because some random cashier cares more about you than you do.

“‘M trying to quit,” he mutters, wishing he didn’t sound like such a child.  Wishing Pepper didn’t act like such a mother.  Wishing he didn’t, in some deep way, need her to.

Pepper “Mmm”s and takes another bite of duck.  Tony waits while she chews, swallows.  The smell of food is somehow, now, making him nauseous.

“How long, Tony?” she asks again, still kind.

“Never stopped.”

Pepper raises her eyebrows.  “Obidiah didn’t know that.”

“Obidiah can go fuck himself.”

“He told me you were in a support group,” Pepper says softly.  Tony laughs, too loud, too slow, the hurt in his stomach clenching into vindictive amusement.

Pepper purses her lips but doesn’t say anything.  Tony watches her, one-and-a-half cushions away from him, watery light from the window pooling on her face.  The wall behind her has no pictures; there are no piles of paper neatly stacked on the coffee table, no shelves of books.  The throw rug next to the couch is clean and plush.  He has no idea how long she’s lived here.

“Are you going to eat?” she asks him gently.

“I thought you weren’t taking care of me.”  He pours himself a bowl of won ton soup anyway.

“I can still be your friend.”  But she shifts as she says it and Tony can feel the pull, like gravity, towards the past.  He takes a sip of soup—warm, savory broth, energy dissipating as heat, moving thermodynamically forward, towards entropy.  He wants to tell her he doesn’t need her anymore, that he’s gotten his life together, that he’s not the same drunken, lost fuckup he was when she graduated and dumped him and boarded a plane for California—all in one day, a bright morning in late spring, champagne toasts to tears in the span of an hour.  He wants to say he’s gotten better.

But he can’t.  He’s spent the intervening years stuck in school, in a bottle—like one of those enchanted wine flagons you hear about in fantasy novels, the ones that never run dry unless you look down the neck; but in the real world, the magic of money has no conditions and he’s stared down into ethanolic depths with no hope of tricking them into disappearing.  He’s gotten no closer to graduating or taking over Stark Industries—fucking career path gifted to him on the coffin of his father, there for him to pick up and coast on, but somehow he  _ can’t do it _ .  The only progress he’s made is downwards, towards the ultimate end, like a star gorging itself on hydrogen isotopes until it builds up so many heavy elements it’s consumed by them, imploding and bringing everything it’s made away with it.  And even then he’d failed at the follow-through.

“I met someone,” he says into the silence.  “The guy I brought to the party?  We—ah—ran into each other by campus one day.  Turns out we had a, um, pretty similar schedule.  So we hang out now.”

Pepper nods, humoring him.  He’s not sure if he’s grateful or not.  “Is he a student too?”

Tony sucks in air, blows it out in the general direction of his soup.  “Yes?  Maybe?  He used to be.”

“At MIT?”

“I don’t think so.”  He grabs a won ton with his chopsticks, turns it around and around before popping it into his mouth.  He doesn’t immediately gag, so he goes in for another.  “Doesn’t matter though.  He’s—”  He stops.  Shakes his head.  “Anyway, he was nice enough to come as my plus-one-slash-drunken-rant-police, so that’s a character endorsement for you.”

“He seemed very nice,” Pepper says.  It’s like she doesn’t say anything at all.  Years of friendship and a failed romance and here they are exchanging pleasantries.  It’s Tony’s fault.  All of it.  Why she left.  Why she came back.  Why they can’t talk about anything.  He feels the whiskey bottles, hard and reassuring, against his leg.  Feels guilt, raw and hungry, in his veins.  “His name is Loki, right?”  Pepper continues.  “Any chance he’s related to Odin Alfadur?”

“What?”

“Odin Alfadur,” Pepper repeats, “CEO of Odin and Sons Investment Bankers.  They’re based in Boston, one of the major family firms in the Fortune 500.  Odin Alfadur’s family got a lot of press a few years ago when one of his sons died during the holidays.  Your Loki looked familiar, that’s all.  And the name isn’t very common.”

Tony tries to say several things at once and they all get jammed in his larynx.  He eats more soup instead and shrugs.

“What happened to the son that died?”

Pepper tilts her head like she’s trying to remember.  “There was a car crash, I think,” she says.  “Hold on a minute.”

She disappears into another room, leaving Tony chewing on an already thoroughly masticated won ton.  He feels a little stupid for not recognizing Odin’s name from Loki’s birth certificate, but then again the name Odin & Sons hadn’t rung any bells either.  He wonders how long they’ve been a big name in banking, where they are on the 500 in relation to Stark Industries.  Where, for that matter, Stark Industries is.  It’s like there’s a thick curtain between Tony and the world that he can’t figure out how to pull aside.

“Here.”  Pepper brushes by him, sits next to him, leans over to show him the screen of her tablet.  There’s a long obituary there, for one Baldr Alfadur, 1983-2008, eldest son of Odin Alfadur and heir to Odin & Sons Incorporated.  Died tragically on the Turnpike in a snowstorm on December 21.  Survived by his parents, Odin and Frigga Alfadur, and two bothers: Thor and Loki.  

Tony scrolls through the rest of the obituary, which spends a long time lauding all Baldr’s achievements and contemplating the injustice of his early death, then backtracks to the Google search that Pepper had used to pull it up.  He taps the first thumbnail under Images: it’s a funeral scene, mourners in black in front of a sedate wooden casket.  He picks out Loki immediately, thin and dark, under the shadow of a nearby tree.  His hair is shorter, slicked back.  He looks at the casket like he’d looked out at the water the night Tony had first met him.  He wonders if that casket was what Loki had seen.  

There’s a big blonde to Loki’s right who Tony recognizes vaguely as Thor.  Next to him is a shortish, sturdy man with long grey hair and an eyepatch.  Odin, probably.  He’s holding the hand of a wiry lady with an artful braid of graying red hair tied up on her head.  Frigga.  Pain is reflected onto each of their faces as if it radiates out from the coffin.  The ground around them is crisp and white with snow, save for the scatterings of dark earth and a padding of fake lawn around the grave.  Pepper’s hand squeezes his shoulder, the one farthest from her, and she must have put her arm around him.  She pulls the tablet off his lap, turns the screen off, sets it on the empty cushion at the end of the couch.  

“I’m sorry,” she says.  She doesn’t tell him to finish his soup, but he does anyway.  It’s cold on his tongue, choked with flakes of disintegrated won ton.  

#

DAY 21

Tony doesn’t know what time it is when his phone rings.  It’s dark in his room, but he’s drawn the curtains.  He’s tired, but he’s been tired for days if he admits it: it had been hiding behind anxiety and adrenaline and that weird gossamer that wraps itself around him periodically.  He’s slept since he left Pepper’s apartment, but he doesn’t know for how long.  

He reaches for his phone, disorientated, fumbles his way along the floor to his bedside table.  Wraps his fingers around it, feels the crack in the screen, slides his thumb sluggishly across it to answer.

“‘Lo.”

High panicked breathing for a second.  “Hello.  You’re the last person Loki contacted.  I’m his mother, Frigga.  He’s left our house in a fury and I don’t know where he’s gone.”

“Fuck.”  Tony’s on his feet, kicking around in the dark for his shoes.  “Fuck, shit, look, I’ll find him.  OK?  I’ll find him.  I’ll call you when I’ve made sure he’s OK, OK?”  He goes to hang up but Frigga’s still talking.

“Yes, all right.  We’re looking for him too.  I’m calling you on his phone; I’ll keep it on me so just call it back with any news.  I’ll call you if we find him.”

“Yeah great.”  His shoes halfway on, he fumbles for his coat by the door, keys in the pocket, good, out the door and down the stairs, panting, feet thumping loud.  “Look, I need to let you know that he probably doesn’t want to see you right now.  So I’ll tell you when I find him but that doesn’t mean you can come in, guns blazing, to come rescue him or anything, got it?”

“Yes.”  Her voice is quiet, almost lost as he slams the door open at the foot of the stairs and sprints across the lobby.  “Yes, I suppose that’s true.  You don’t even need to tell me where you find him if he doesn’t want me to know.  I just want to know that he’s safe.”

“Yep.”  Tony hangs up, thrusts his hand, phone clenched in it, out to hail a cab.  One pulls over and he jumps into the passenger seat, startling the driver.  

“Hey—” the cabbie starts, but Tony’s talking over him, telling him to go to the bridge, to get there  _ fast _ , as fast as possible, that he’s Tony Stark of Stark Industries and he’ll pay handsomely.  He braces himself against the dashboard as the cabbie peels away from the curb.  

Tony stares out the windshield as they drive, watching the buildings shrink as they near the river.  He’s leaning forward in his seat by the time he can see the bridge, searching the sidewalk.  He sees a dark shape, stationary, at approximately the middle of the span.  “Pull over there,” he says, pointing.  

“There’s no parking here!” the cabbie protests in thick, accented English.

“I don’t care.  That’s my friend over there and he’s probably on his way to climbing over that railing and letting go.”  The cabbie blanches, reaches for the radio.  “Don’t call anyone.  You hear me?  Do not call the authorities.  I can talk him down.  I want you to do two and only two things.  Pull over there, and wait for us.”

The cabbie nods, hands tight on the steering wheel, and flips the turn signal.  As soon as the cab lurches to a stop Tony’s out the door, tripping over the curb, arms flailing, trying to scream, not getting the air, watching Loki toe off one shoe with a stockinged foot.  “Loki!”  Tony manages; Loki looks up, pale, shocked, eyes big and dark in a fragile face, and then Tony’s on him, arms around his back, twisting them in the air, trying to get under him but only managing to get them both on their sides, and then they’re both yelling, gritty pavement smacking into them, solid, exquisitely painfully solid, and close, pressing into them, molding them around it, permanent and hard and close.  And Loki’s kicking, scrabbling at Tony’s coat, at his hair, at his face, shoving and scratching and screeching, and Tony grabs his own wrists behind Loki’s back and holds on, holds him there, holds him close, as he feels hair rip in staccato burns out of his scalp and blood run warm down his cheeks.  He holds on until Loki stops fighting, until he just heaves, big and tall in Tony’s arms, and tears sting the scratches on Tony’s cheeks and he’s not sure if they’re his or Loki’s.

“Loki,” he says again, call and response.

Loki doesn’t answer.  Just beats his fists weakly against Tony’s shoulders and sobs.

“Loki, Loki, Loki.”  He does his best to croon it, soft and easy.  He rocks them against the pavement, grit digging into his back, something solid under his legs, probably Loki’s shoes.  

“Get the fuck off me.”

Tony shakes his head and squeezes.  Loki draws back, tense again, arms like iron rods straightening between them, pushing him away.  “I said get the fuck off me.”

Tony doesn’t. He follows Loki into a sitting position and loosens his hold a little.  Loki wipes his eyes with his sleeve and takes a few fast, big breaths, like the video of a collapsing building played backwards.  When he meets Tony’s eyes, it’s like they’ve never met.

“Let me go.”

“No.”  

A shudder passes through Loki, tremors like an earthquake.  Tony rubs his back.

“I hate you.”

Tony stops.  Stops breathing. Starts again.  “Loki, I—”

“You  _ left me _ !” Loki screams, feral, too close, “You fucking took me away from this, away from here, and then you  _ left me on my own _ !”

“You were the one who wanted to come back,” Tony says as gently as he can manage.  His heart is beating hard everywhere, like it’s swelled to fill every space in his body.  There’s a high, tense fog in his head that makes it hard to parse what’s going on.

“Not in  _ Boston _ ,” Loki spits, wrenching himself backwards, and Tony almost loses him, manages to catch his arms and holds him at the elbows, holds him close, holds him steady.  Loki starts shouting again, and it’s like holding a hurricane, all windspeed and violent depression, a swirling vortex of hurt and anger.

“We had sex and then you  _ left _ , you sank away from me so deep I couldn’t see you anymore.  You want me to believe it wasn’t because I did something  _ wrong _ ?  That I didn’t  _ break you _ or  _ disgust you _ or  _ make you angry _ because I couldn’t put my hand on your dick or, or do something else, I don’t know, because I didn’t  _ make you happy _ ?  What the  _ fuck _ was I  _ supposed  _ to think?”  

He jerks his arms against Tony’s like he’s trying to break free.  Or break Tony.  “You said nothing to me.   _ Nothing! _ ”  Something is quivering in his face, reminding Tony of liquefaction, when something that’s supposed to be solid suddenly collapses into a fluid, sucking mess.  “I destroy every person I meet.  I—I killed my brother.  I did such violence against my birth parents that they left me.  I sabotaged Odin’s expectations of me so thoroughly he stopped hoping I’d ever be anything but a fuckup.  I made it so hard for Frigga to love me that she barely goes through the motions anymore.  And you—I thought I’d destroyed  _ you _ , too, because I  _ can’t protect things, Tony _ , I crush them instead when I’m not, when I’m not looking—”

And here he does shake apart, going limp, pitching forward into Tony’s shoulder and sobbing, big and open mouthed, like he’s still screaming but doesn’t have any sound left.

“Oh Loki,” Tony says, whispery soft, because grief isn’t a mountain, grief isn’t an ocean, grief is being force fed cotton stuffing, soft and springy and the more you try to tear it apart the bigger it seems to get until it suffocates you.  “Loki that wasn’t your fault.  That was me being the selfish, needy fuckup I am.  I’m sorry.  I’m so, so, so sorry.”

“I don’t  _ care _ ,” Loki chokes out, “I don’t care how fucking  _ sorry _ you are Tony, I  _ don’t care _ because it’s not just you, it’s me, I can’t care about people, I can’t be  _ around them _ without doing something  _ wrong _ , something that  _ hurts them _ —” he keens, long and loud and lonely, “I, I, I  _ can’t _ anymore, Tony, I just, I fucking, I  _ can’t _ .”

“I know, I know.  I know.  I have a cabbie here who can take us away.  Remember?  How I told you we could run away to France or Latvia or wherever the fuck we want to run away to?  Let’s do it.  You and me.  We can get off the sidewalk and into the cab and go to the airport and buy two seats on the first flight out of the country.  Huh?  Does that sound good?”

Loki starts shaking again, all over, shaking his head fast, no no no no no.  “Can’t go home.”

“That’s OK, that’s why we’ll just go to the airport.  We won’t pack anything.  Just bring ourselves.”

“Passport’s in my bedroom.”

“Ooooh.”  Tony starts rubbing Loki’s back again to give himself time to think.  “How about this.  I call your mom—”

“N—”

“Ssh, let me finish.  I call your mom, she has your phone and she’s waiting to hear you’re OK.  I won’t tell her where we are.  I won’t tell her where I found you.  I’ll tell her to clear everyone out of the house for an hour, and then we’ll go there.  You can wait in the cab, I’ll have them park around the corner.  You tell me where your passport is, I’ll go in and get it.  Just in case anyone of your family’s still around.  Then we’ll head back to mine, I’ll grab my passport, and we’ll go.  Can you do that?”

Loki gulps a few times, presses his face hard into Tony’s shoulder.  “Leave me at your house.”

“Mm?”

He turns his head to speak into Tony’s neck.  “Leave me at your house.  I don’t want to run into anyone on the street.”

“OK.  That’s fine.  We can do that.”  

They stay on the sidewalk for a while, Loki intermittently crying and trying to stop himself from crying, Tony holding him, feeling so stuffed with feeling that he’s stiff with it.  Eventually, Loki draws back, gently, reaches around to remove Tony’s hands from his back.  “Let’s go,” he says softly.  Stands.  Reaches down to pull Tony to his feet.  Standing, he pulls Loki into another hug, presses a kiss to his temple.  They stumble into the cab, latched onto each other in the back seat, and Tony gives the cabbie his address.  After that, nobody speaks.  Not until Loki says, “Oh,” like he’s just remembered something unspeakably sad.  Tony tenses, readying himself for another outburst of some sort, but Loki just shakes his head a little.  “We forgot my shoes,” he explains.

 

The cabbie drops Tony in an ostentatious neighborhood he’s visited a few times before with Obidiah.  The houses are big and old and brick, set well back from the road.  Tony takes the steps two at a time up to Loki’s door and tries the handle.  It turns easily, swinging open on a long dark hallway hung with massive canvases heavy with oil paint.  They make the space feel narrow and Tony resists an urge to sidestep down the hallway towards the stairs.  He leaves the door open and doesn’t turn on any lights.

The stairs are at the back of the house, just like Loki’d said, past wide doorless openings onto a living room, a sitting room, a dining room, a kitchen, all painted dark, rich tones with light trim and occupied by heavy wooden furniture.  Arrangements of fake flowers peek out from the corners of shelves, a slice of dining room table.  A collection of cigar boxes is displayed proudly in cases on the living room wall.  In the sitting room, an entire shelving unit is given over to silver models of historic airplanes.  The staircase is lined with what look like school portraits: as he ascends, he travels back in time, Loki’s and Thor’s and Baldr’s faces shrinking, rounding; their hair going silky and thin, their teeth getting bigger relative to the size of their mouths.  The stairs creak under him, old wood probably, and he imagines the pilgrims that the architect imagined building this place.  

Loki’s room is in a corner upstairs, between the edge of the house and a bathroom.  Tony pushes the door open gingerly, steeling himself.  He doesn’t know what he’s expecting—chaos, disorder, some evidence of whatever drove Loki out of the house today, or years ago.

Instead, the room is almost empty.  Done up in cool grey, it’s one of the lightest areas of the house.  Linen curtains lift with a breeze that brings a slice of cold in through an open window.  There’s no bed frame, just a mattress and box spring on the floor, and Tony wonders if that was personal choice, or if Loki’d taken his bed frame with him to his apartment and then jettisoned it.  There’s a bedside table that rises higher than the bed itself, topped by a silver reading lamp and no books.  The closet is doorless and empty, save for a few cardboard boxes and a couple small piles of folded clothes.  There’s a thick winter coat that Tony recognizes thrown over the back of a desk chair.  He grabs it, smoothing it over his arm as he steps gingerly around the bed.  As promised, there’s a small safe against the wall on the far side.  It looks like something Tony had as a kid, with a laughably flimsy dial on it.  He turns it, counter-clockwise, clockwise, back again, and it clicks open.  Inside is a journal, black leather and closed with a magnet, a small stack of books, a closed laptop and neatly coiled power cord.  And on the shelf below, a wallet, thin, worn; and a passport.  Tony grabs everything, plus the clothes in the closet, shoves it all into a messenger bag he finds on the floor.  He closes the safe, twirls the dial to lock it again.  When he leaves, he notices the door has no lock on it, just a knob.  Wonders at the small insistence on privacy in a big, open, dark house.  

Downstairs, he finds Loki’s phone on the dining room table, where Frigga had told him it would be.  He grabs it, dials the number entered as Frigga (cell) when he’s outside.  “We’re done,” he tells her, sliding into the cab, “You can all come back now.”

“Thank you, Tony,” she says, sounding scratchy and small and infinitely sad, “Where are you going now?”

“Can’t say.  But I’ll let you know if anything happens that you need to know about.”

“Yes.  Of course.  Enter my number into your phone in case Loki won’t let you use his.”

“I’ll do that.  Goodbye, ma’am.”

“Goodbye.”

Loki stares at him when he returns, takes the messenger bag when Tony hands it to him as if there might be a bomb inside.

“I thought you were just getting my passport,” he says suspiciously as he opens the zipper.

Tony shrugs, squeezing the juncture of Loki’s neck and shoulder.  “I was, but some of this other stuff looked important.”  He moves off, letting Loki sort through his stuff in peace while he grabs his own passport and the envelope of money he’d withdrawn in New York.  As an afterthought, he grabs his own backpack and fills it with clothes, his laptop and charging cable, his phone charger.  Back in the living room, he finds Loki gingerly repacking his bag.  Tony passes him, heading for the kitchen.  Returns with one of the convenience store fruit cakes, wrapped in its thin plastic bag, and hands it to Loki.

“Merry Christmas,” he says, and, as much as he can, means it.

 

They stop by a mall on the way to the airport, Tony darting inside to buy a pair of new black Converse in Loki’s size.  Loki puts them on in the back of the cab and Tony remembers to take the empty box with them when they leave.  He tips the cabbie handsomely, on top of the already high tab, and leads Loki inside.

“We’re not going to get a ticket,” Loki frets, “It’s Christmas Day.  There won’t be any seats left.”

“Just watch,” Tony replies, trying to sound confident.  He leads Loki over to the nearest airline desk and spends a while flirting with the serviceperson.  When it turns out there are indeed no seats on a trans-Atlantic flight departing in the next eight hours, Tony takes them to the next airline.  And the next.  And the next.  Eventually they manage to get two first class seats on a British Airways flight to Paris through London Heathrow, departing in four hours.  Tony hands over their passports and his credit card.  “Hallelujah,” he mutters into Loki’s ear.

They kill time in the duty-free shops, stocking up on shampoo and toothpaste and shaving cream.  Tony refuses to let Loki pay for any of it, and this time he doesn’t put up a fight.  Tony doesn’t know whether to be worried about that or just chalk it up to an ebbing adrenaline rush and severe emotional fatigue.  Either way, he buys them both Burger King and then a celebratory pint at one of the overpriced bars by the first-class lounges.  Loki doesn’t object to that either, just sits there nursing his beer and staring into space.  He looks exhausted, helpless.  Not necessarily relieved but also not tense either, not wary.  At one point he takes Tony’s hand from the table and holds it, thumb circling the back of Tony’s knuckles.  Tony tries to smile at him and it looks like Loki tries to return it.

Their seats on the plane aren’t adjacent, but Loki looks so terrified at the prospect of being separated from Tony that the sharply-dressed woman with the seat next to Tony offers to switch with him.  Tony thanks her but she just shakes her head at him and says something about how she can’t separate such a cute couple on Christmas.  Tony nods, trying not to think about how close they’d come to being separated much more permanently.  

Loki sleeps for most of the flight, curled up in his seat like a child.  Tony watches him over the partition between them, jittery and too exhausted to sleep.  He feels raw, like someone’s been over every inch of his insides with rough-grained sandpaper.  He fires off an email to Rhodie, fingers shaking, hoping somehow that it’ll help.

 

_ R— _

_ Hey.  Happy Christmas and all that, hope you’re enjoying it wherever you are.  Do they celebrate Christmas in Afghanistan? I mean, really celebrate it.  Not church shit or whatever.  Or did you say you were on leave for this?  Anyway like I said, enjoy yourself. _

_ Not to be a downer on this day of joy or whatever, but I have kind of a serious question.  OK that’s a total lie I have about ten billion serious questions and if I don’t ask anyone any of them ever I might actually explode.  Really.  Physics says that can happen now. _

_ Right.  So.  Since we spoke last I’ve gotten myself a boyfriend who has this thing about killing himself.  Specifically the thing he has about killing himself is that he wants to.  That’s how I met him, actually.  We were both trying to not exist anymore in the same point of spacetime and somehow that ended up with us continuing to exist in the same point in spacetime, which is great, really, existence is certainly nothing to sneeze at, I guess.  Oh yeah don’t worry about that whole thing where I was attempting suicide.  I’m over it.  Well, not really.  But you don’t have to worry anyway.  I’m on a plane for the next bajillion hours and those are famous for not letting you have things you can hurt people with, including yourself.  I mean, you could probably off yourself by eating something you were seriously allergic to, but I’m not seriously allergic to anything so we’re good on that point. _

_ So here’s the question.  The serious question.  How do you do it?  How do you surround yourself with people who know they’re going to die and not die?  How do you get up every morning in the literal manifestation of Hell and then get up the next morning and the one after that and the one after that?  How do you tell people who know how not OK everything is that everything is OK, or do you just not even try and there’s some kind of weird gallows humor thing that happens and everyone somehow manages to keep on keeping on when they know full well they’re really keeping one foot in the grave all the time? _

_ Like I said, super fun stuff to contemplate while you celebrate the birth of Baby Jesus.  Eat a turkey leg for me if you have them in Afghanistan, because I’m not sure they have them in France. _

_ -T _

 

London greets them wet and warm, a cloying drizzle trickling down the windows.  They get soaked rushing from the plane to a shuttle bus that will transport them to the terminal, and Loki’s hair mats to his neck in what must be cold, wet clumps.  He spends a good amount of time squeezing the water out of it in a bathroom on the UK side of the border while Tony leans against the bank of sinks and watches him through eyes so tired they ache.  Christmas carols play on loop over the radio, a day late by the calendar on Tony’s phone.  They’d left the last hours of the holiday somewhere over the Atlantic.  

At Loki’s insistence, Tony boots up his laptop and pre-books them a hotel room in Paris.  It’s depressingly expensive, but not unsurprisingly so.  Rhodie’s written back, but Tony doesn’t read the message.  Instead, he powers down his laptop and leaves Loki to watch it as he exchanges a chunk of his dollars for euros.  

When he returns, Loki’s flipping idly through the papers Tony’d grabbed from his safe.  Tony spots the carbon copy of the adoption specialist’s contract and some printouts on some type of custom stationery.  He hands Loki a toasted egg sandwich from Pret a Manger and a large cappuccino.  Loki takes them, slipping the papers back into his bag.

“What the hell are we doing,” he says like he’s being paid poorly to say it.  

Tony shrugs, sitting down next to him.  “Not being in Boston.”

Loki snorts and takes a sip of his drink.  Tony takes this as a good sign.  “Is it worth it, though?” he asks, voice small.  “All of this?  The flight, the hotel.  The shoes.”  He wiggles his foot in emphasis.  “It’s a lot of money.”

Tony glares at him.  Holds it until Loki looks up at him.  “Don’t you dare ask that,” Tony says, quiet and dead serious.  “Don’t you fucking dare.”

Loki nods, looks away.  Draws his shoulders up around his ears like he’s trying to hide between them.  

 

Paris is drier than London and colder.  Their hotel room looks out over the city with a view of the river, far away.  It’s not unlike the view from Tony’s apartment, and part of him wishes they could stay somewhere else.  Loki collapses on the king-size bed, lays spread-eagled, staring at the ceiling.  

“This was all they had,” Tony says, “I can have them bring up a roll-away if you want.  I’ll even sleep on it.”

Loki shakes his head, not otherwise moving.  “This is fine.”

Tony lays down next to him, on his side.  He takes the hand of Loki’s that’s closest to him and holds it.  Loki shifts, startled.  But he smiles slightly and tugs Tony closer, into a kiss.

“What happened?” Tony asks when they break apart.  Loki starts, eyes going wide, curling up a little.  “Sorry.  You.  You don’t have to answer.”

Loki works his jaw a little, puts his legs slowly and pointedly back down.  “No.  I will.”  He doesn’t say anything else.

“I found out what happened to Baldr,” Tony adds, because his sense of self-preservation continues to fail to exist.  “I’m sorry.”

Loki scowls.  “Please don’t apologize for using Google.  I won’t take offense because you used a basic tool.”  He starts picking at the seams of the duvet cover.

“Pepper told me, actually.  She recognized you at the thing.  The party.  And she remembered about Baldr and—anyway.  She showed me.”

“And what,” Loki draws the words out dramatically, “Did you see?”

Tony sighs.  He doesn’t want this conversation, doesn’t want to fight.  He’s tired, bone tired.  He wants a drink.  “That he died in a car crash on the Turnpike.  That was it.  Not a lot of detail.”

“Quite.”  Loki’s fingers find a stray thread and tug at it.  It gives a little, tenting the bedspread between them when it catches.

Tony watches him for awhile, watches his breath catch and stutter, watches his eyes flick over the flat off-white of the ceiling like there’s something there.  “I’m going to check out the bar downstairs,” he says, sliding off the bed.  “I’ll be back later.”

“Don’t,” Loki says in a small voice.  He grabs Tony’s sleeve.  “Don’t leave.  Please.  We can order room service.”

“Sure, but I’m going to have to get more out of it than a morose fifty yard stare.”

Loki sits up, a flash of anger in his eyes.  “I was on my way to  _ jumping off a bridge today _ , Tony, I think I’m allowed a little moroseness.”

“Technically that was yesterday,” Tony points out, “And I get it, you know I get it, but we’re not in Boston anymore, we’re in a completely different goddamn country and sue me for wanting to know what’s up with you!”

“Not everything is about what you want!”

“I  _ know that _ , I just—”

“No, Tony, I  _ don’t think you do _ .  You pulled me off the bridge to take me on a wild goose chase that  _ you wanted _ to go on in the  _ first place _ and now you won’t let me have  _ peace and quiet _ to—”

“I’m  _ sorry _ ,” Tony screams, so loud his throat burns, “If doing stupid things and asking stupid questions is the only way I know to  _ care about you _ !”

Loki shuts his mouth with an audible click.  He starts picking at the duvet again.  Tony’s breathing hard, swallowing a lot, trying to get the fuzziness in his brain to coalesce into something, anything clear.  

“I don’t owe you any explanations,” Loki mutters eventually.

“If you think you can get out of hurting someone—me, someone, Loki, I’m talking about  _ me _ , if you think you can get out of hurting  _ me _ —if you slip away and  _ die _ , then I want you to know you’re too  _ fucking late _ .”

His head hurts with too many thoughts; his legs are sore from hours of stillness; he’s shaking, when did he start shaking, when did tears start dripping down his face, when did his body stop being something he could control.  Loki gets off the bed slowly, walks around it until he’s face to face with Tony.  Gingerly, he wraps his arms around him.  Leans his cheek against the top of Tony’s head.

“Let’s order room service,” he says after an interminable moment.

#

Day 22

Tony realizes as he wakes up that he must have fallen asleep.  His back feels like a steel rod and his entire head pounds rhythmically.  The bed he’s in is too soft, dipping off to the left like he’s falling out of orbit.  A voice murmurs softly in French from some distance away.  

He can’t immediately think of a reason to be in a strange bed with someone who speaks French, so he opens his eyes.  Loki’s face is inches from his, pale except for dark, reddish purple bruises around his eyes.  Tony starts, shoving himself backwards and flailing against the comforter.  Consciously, he forces himself to relax, one muscle group at a time.  Swallows a couple times and tastes the erratic thudding of his heart.

Loki’s gaze flicks to Tony’s face.  He doesn’t smile.  Just blinks and purses his lips as he swallows.  

“Morning,” Tony says.  He figures stating facts is a safe way to start.  “You look like shit.”

Loki rolls onto his back and goes back to staring at the ceiling.  He’d spent a lot of the night like that, having returned to it as soon as he finished picking at the pasta he’d ordered from room service.  Tony thinks he must have mapped every single bump and rut in the plaster, then kept looking long enough that their outlines started to swim and wobble and bleed into a completely new landscape.  “Anything good up there?” Silence.  “I’m going to get breakfast, you coming?”  Silence.

Tony dresses and leaves slowly, thinking maybe Loki will follow him.  The door to the room closes without him having moved.  Tony heads downstairs, following signs for the complimentary breakfast, wondering how much sullen silence he can take.  He can’t deny that it was his idea to get the hell out of Boston, but he refuses to think it was a bad one.  That city was terrible for both of them and Loki has to know that.  

He wanders through the main lobby, still hosting a massive Christmas tree with the same generic gold and silver baubles that hang on corporate American Christmas trees, and finds the breakfast in a conference room down a hallway.  He grabs an armload of pastries, wraps them in a napkin, and tries to find coffee.  He finds an espresso bar instead, and sucks down an Americano as fast as he can stand to.  It doesn’t do much to help his headache, or the jittery panic twitching in his fingers.  Physiologically, it should make it worse.  The bar in the restaurant isn’t staffed, but it’s also deserted.  Tony glances around before ducking behind it and pouring the contents of first bottle he lays his hands on into his takeaway coffee cup.  He leaves a twenty euro note on the counter.

Back in the room, Loki still hasn’t moved.  He’s shaking; he tries to stop when Tony enters but his shoulders still jerk a little and the morning light picks up the tears on his cheeks.  Tony takes a gulp of not-coffee—rum, and not half bad rum—before setting all the food on the bedside table and sitting next to Loki.  After a moment, he reaches down and pets Loki’s hair, hoping the gesture won’t get him punched.

It doesn’t.  Loki presses into Tony’s hand, curls in on himself and starts sobbing in earnest.  Tony waits.  He pets Loki’s hair with one hand and uses the other to alternately bring himself pastries and sips of rum.  He remembers nights in the lab spent in this kind of pain, remembers the bargains he made with half-built robots for any kind of real, human comfort.  He thinks that this is a good thing he’s doing, petting Loki’s hair in a hotel room in Paris on Boxing Day.  

Eventually, Loki’s sobs stutter out and he wipes his eyes roughly with the backs of his hands.  Tony reaches over and dangles a chocolate croissant in front of him, which he takes.  “You probably want to know what that was about.”  His voice is cracked.

Tony shrugs.  “Yeah, I do, but I’m not going to ask.  If you want to tell me, I’ll listen.”  It’s something that the therapist he’d been forced to see after his parents died said a lot.  Tony’d never said much of anything in response, too tangled up in his own confusion and anger and a clawing guilt where his grief for Howard should have been.  He figures maybe the line will work better on Loki than it ever did on him.

Loki picks at the croissant, flaking pastry all over the sheets.  He sticks his tongue out.  “I hate obligation.”

“Christ, Loki,” Tony starts, thinking he’s about to go off about how he doesn’t owe him anything again.  But he stops himself.  He had promised to listen.  There’s a long silence while Loki shreds more pastry and finally dabs some of it into his mouth.  He chews in tiny, stiff motions.  Swallows.

“I know where my father is.”

“Great.”

“He’s in prison.”

Tony open his mouth, ready to start any one of a dozen sentences.  He chooses, “Less great” after too long of a pause.

“He’s in prison,” Loki continues, “for acts of treason against the French state.”

“Your birth dad is a terrorist.”  

Loki rips off another piece of croissant and mashes it between his fingers, turning it into a mushy pulp.  “Yes.  This is presumably why, or part of why, he shipped me off to America.”

“You’re not American?”

Loki shrugs tightly as he worries pastry between his thumb and forefinger.  “I’m a citizen now, probably because Odin adopted me.  Or I was born there.  I don’t know.”  He sighs heavily, like he’s trying to push something poisonous out through his lungs.  “I want to meet him.”

“Okay,” Tony says, “Do you know which prison he’s in?  What his name is?”

“He’s an inmate in the VIP wing of Prison de la Sante,” Loki replies, sounding like he’s reading out of a textbook, “His name is Laufey.”

“Great.  Let’s pop in for a visit.”  Tony moves to get up but Loki’s arm shoots out.  He pulls Tony down by the sleeve of his shirt.

“It’s not that simple, Tony.  You need a court order to be able to visit, and I still don’t have any documentation proving my relationship to him, and besides—”

Tony leans the rest of the way in and presses a short, gentle kiss to Loki’s lips.  He stops talking, instead staring at Tony with huge, watery eyes.  “Don’t worry about it,” Tony tells him, grabbing his phone with his free hand and showing it to Loki, “Let me make a call.”

 

“Give me twenty-four hours,” the Stark Industries lawyer says when Tony explains what he needs.  He expects her to hang up on him after, to complete the scene, but she doesn’t, leaving him to mutter, “Cool, thanks,” and awkwardly hang up himself.

“Come on,” he says to Loki, “I’ve got someone on getting us into the prison but it’s going to take a little time.  In the meantime,” he crosses to the window and dramatically throws the curtains open.  Sunlight lances into the room.  “We have the whole day, and all of Paris, at our disposal.”  He grins as mightily and convincingly as he can.  Loki, blinking and shielding his eyes, doesn’t respond.  He’s still in yesterday’s clothes, mussed from the collection of flights and cars and uncomfortable sleeping positions.  His hair is greasy and tangled and he looks distinctly like he’s been punched, hard, in the face.  But yesterday’s clothes are still clothes, and Tony’ll be damned if he lets Loki wallow away a perfectly good trip to Paris.  He grabs Loki’s hand and fairly drags him out the door, grabbing their coats and scarves and his takeaway cup of rum as they go.

For his part, Loki lets himself be dragged.  His only protest is that Tony “Give me my coat.”  Tony hands it over, grinning proudly.

Loki seems to wake up a little more in the elevator.  He pushes his hair out of his face, yawns expansively, and tries to steal Tony’s coffee cup. “’S in here?” he asks.  Tony holds the cup out of his reach.

“Mine.  We’ll grab you one before we leave.”

 

Outside, the wind picks icy fingers up their coat sleeves.  Loki curls around his coffee protectively.  Tony stretches out as far as he can.  A taxi puts on its blinker and slides up to the curb.  

Tony tells the driver to take them to the Champs d’Elysees because he remembers the name from a song Maria used to play in the quiet afternoons when Howard was out.  It had played at her bedside as well, until Howard threw the stereo across the room the day the doctor said there was nothing he could do for her.  The cassette tape spewed out, clattered over the hardwood, and came to rest at Tony’s feet.  He’d wanted to grab it, but before he could, Howard stormed past, and the cassette cracked like bone under his heel.

Now, Paris streaks by through the foggy taxi window.  Piles of snow at doorways flash past like blips and streaks of Morse Code.  He thinks that if he stayed here long enough, if he drove and drove and drove in an endless line of taxis, he could decode the message.  Loki sits beside him, one hand absently on Tony’s, the other curled around his coffee, which he sips at periodically.  

The taxi leaves them on the side of a broad boulevard lined with trees that look like they’re hunched up against the cold.  The air is warmer than it was in Boston, and almost wet.  The snow piled around the trees gurgles as it melts.  The buildings lining the sidewalk are warm grey stone, all short and dark-roofed.  Chains of unlit Christmas lights hang from eaves like icicles.  Ground-floor windows gleam with shiny red and green and gold paper, package props for after-Christmas sales.  Farther down, the red awnings of restaurants arc over the sidewalk, sheltering clustered assortments of wicker furniture from the snow.  

Tony grabs Loki’s hand and starts to walk.  Loki is silent, still sipping at his coffee, but he looks around at the shops and the trees and the passing cars with something almost like contentment.  They pass a small patisserie with sculpted cakes and pastries and candied nuts piled in the window like jewels in a hoard, and Loki actually  _ sighs _ .  Tony drags him into the store and insists on buying two of everything Loki wants.  Loki doesn’t even protest about Tony paying.

Outside again, Tony juggles bags of pastry, trying to unearth the candied chestnuts Loki had picked out.  A bag squirts out between his elbow and his side; before he can reach out to catch it, Loki’s there, grabbing it out of the air.  He unrolls the top and peers inside, lifting out two slices of white roll cake.  He bites one experimentally.  As he chews, his eyes flutter closed and he moans, a deep kind of sound that seems to well up through his entire body.  He swallows and, with a wicked grin, holds the other slice up to Tony’s face.  Tony takes a bite and shouts, almost choking, from how good it is.  Loki laughs, actually  _ laughs _ , and leans in to kiss the meringue from Tony’s chin.  The kiss is sweet and deep and slow, and Tony pulls Loki against him, crushing the rest of the pastry bags.  Powdered sugar puffs up under their chins and Tony breaks the kiss.  Loki opens his mouth, face scrunched with confusion, and Tony dips his head to lick a long stripe of sugar off Loki’s jaw.  Loki groans again, rough and long.  Tony licks the sugar from his lips and leans up into another kiss, letting Loki taste the sweet from his skin.

He doesn’t know how long it takes to finish cleaning the sugar off of Loki with his lips and tongue and teeth, but when he’s done Loki’s breathing hard and his eyes are black with want and he backs Tony against a tree to return the favor.  He cages Tony in his arms and nips at his jawline, nuzzling his collar open.  Tony’s hands clasp uselessly around the rest of the pastry bags, pinned between their bodies.  His breath catches as Loki sucks down his neck, and he’s sure there’s no sugar down that far but he’s also sure he doesn’t care.  Passers by, bundled in coats and mittens and scarves, glare at the two of them.  Tony tries to smile at them, to look casual, but Loki does something with his tongue and he gives up, leans his head back against the tree and shuts his eyes.  He’s dimly aware of the cold, of the light, of the air compressing and releasing around passing cars; but everything important is contained in the space between Loki’s mouth and Tony’s skin, and everything important is hot and close and  _ good _ .

“Serves you right,” Loki pants in his ear, as the cold hits his neck.  Tony shivers and tries to pull at Loki’s lapels, but his hands are still pinned.  Loki glances down and smirks.  “Careful,” he says, with a roll of his hips that is the exact opposite, “We wouldn’t want to lose any pastries.”  He reaches between them, still pressed against Tony, one of his legs wedged between both of Tony’s, unrolls the top of one of the bags, plucks out a single candied chestnut, and sets it slowly on his tongue.  He holds Tony’s gaze as he closes his mouth and sucks, hard, on the candy.  Tony watches his cheeks hollow, his throat bob and flex as he swallows.  He feels his mouth go dry.

Loki chews briefly, swallows again, licks his lips, steps away.  “Come on,” he says, holding out a hand to Tony.  His eyes are still dark, and the skin around them still purple and swollen, and there’s mischief in his voice. “We have a lot of Paris to see.”

#

DAY 23

The sun rises at 8:44 am on December 28.  The temperature is 38 degrees Fahrenheit.  It is mostly cloudy.  The Earth spins on its axis at 300 meters per second.  The sum of the truth of all these facts is contingent on Tony being in Paris, France, a city sitting at roughly 49 degrees North latitude.  Anywhere Tony moves from here, these facts are less true.  If he was in Boston, for example, sunrise would be earlier.  The temperature would likely be cooler and the sky partly cloudy.  The Earth would spin at the slightly faster rate of 343 meters per second.  

Tony rolls onto his side and counts the other facts that are contingent on his being in Paris, France.

Loki snuffles in his sleep, scrunching his nose up.  His hair has fallen into his face, clinging to his forehead and sliding off his nose.  Some of it is trapped in the corner of his mouth, damp.  Tony reaches over to brush it aside, but stops himself.  Loki’s a light sleeper, he’s found, waking whenever Tony would scoot an arm that had fallen asleep out from under his neck or throw a leg over his hip.  

He was also prone to waking in the middle of the night for no reason at all that Tony could see, just shooting into consciousness like he’d been fired out of a cannon, clutching at Tony so hard he found crescents in his arms in the morning.

This close, Loki’s breath is warm and bitter on Tony’s face.  His hand is draped over Tony’s, fingers curled loosely around Tony’s thumb.

They’d stumbled into the hotel room late last night, drunk on a cocktail of fancy, honest-to-God champagne-from-Champagne and some liqueur their waiter had insisted was made in a monastery from a recipe from the 18th century.  In all honesty, Tony had been more drunk than Loki, but he’d also been less obvious about it.  He’d fallen into bed right away and laid there while Loki disappeared into the bathroom and returned awhile later, shaking and clammy.  Tony had nuzzled into his shoulder and hugged him until he stopped shaking and his breathing evened out.  Somewhere along the line, he—Tony—had fallen asleep.  

Loki had apparently followed him, but he wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t until hours later.

Tony is, in an abstract way, concerned that Loki doesn’t get enough sleep.  But he also can’t think of anything he can do about it, other than let him lie once he’s finally drifted off.  

The opening chords of “Rock and Roll Train” blare from the bedside table, loud.  Tony almost falls out of bed grabbing for his phone.  “ ‘Lo,” he answers, quiet as possible on the off chance Loki hasn’t been woken up.

The Stark Industries lawyer is on the line.  “Sherine,” she says, like she already knows he’s forgotten her name. “Sorry for the delay. Your friend has an appointment today at noon at the prison.  I’ve emailed you the paperwork he needs.  Will that be all, Mr. Stark?”

“Uh—yeah, that’s great.  Awesome. Top notch.”  Tony blinks hard, trying to focus, but the lawyer hangs up.  His phone beeps to let him know he has mail.

Loki groans, and that answers one of Tony’s questions.  He rolls back over, leaving the phone for the moment; Loki’s eyes are still shut, but his hands are scraping the hair out of his face.  His teeth are bared as his back bows in a stretch.  

“Good morning,” Tony murmurs, and leans over him to kiss him.

Loki tastes like stale bile.

Tony props himself on his elbows and helps swipe some hair out of Loki’s eyes.  “Did you throw up last night?” he asks gently.

Loki flops back on the mattress, arms falling to his sides.  He nods, opening his eyes but not looking at Tony.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” 

Loki shrugs.  He runs a hand up Tony’s arm, soft and fast.

“Who called?” he asks, then swallows with a grimace.

“You OK?”

Loki nods, looking annoyed.  “Who called?” he repeats.

“The lawyer.  She, uh, she got you an appointment to meet Laufey.”  

Loki starts. “Really?”

“Yeah.  Uh. It’s today.  The appointment is today.  At noon.  So,” Tony shrugs, strokes Loki’s cheek, “We should probably get going.  There’s some stuff we need to print out before we get there.”

“Time is it?” 

“Almost eleven.”

“Fuck.”  

Loki slithers out from under him and lurches to his feet.  “I’m showering,” he mutters, making unsteadily for the bathroom.

“Go for it,” Tony says to the closed door.

 

Tony manages to get the paperwork printed and steal coffee and pastry from the continental breakfast by the time Loki’s dressed.  On the metro, Loki skims the paperwork, occasionally borrowing Tony’s phone to translate the French.  They’ve just transferred to line 6 when Loki stills.  

“Tony.”

“Yeah?”  

Loki licks his lips, hands fluttering over the pages in his lap.  “You can’t come in with me.”

“Come in to what?”

“The prison.”  Loki takes a deep, shuddery breath.  “It’s family members only.  You’re not allowed.”  He smiles wanly, in a manner that is clearly meant to be brave.  “I’m sorry.”

Tony shrugs, drapes his arm around Loki’s shoulders and pulls him in.  Loki rests his head on Tony’s shoulder and keeps flipping through the paperwork.

 

Tony leaves Loki beside a dirty stone wall that drowns and entire city block in shadow.  There’s a big cement block jutting out, flanked by two doors: one big enough for a truck to drive through, the other only large enough for a person.  There’s a low window in the block, dark with tinted glass.  Security cameras perch like pigeons around the doors.

Beside the entrance complex is a rickety parade of benches awned by sagging, rusty aluminum.  Coils of barbed wire peek over the top of the wall.  

Gripping Tony’s hand, Loki approaches the window and hands over his paperwork, his passport.  There’s a brief conversation in which the guard speaks in fast, tinny French though a speaker in the glass and Loki responds with stumbling, basic phrases.  Eventually the guard nods and Loki backs away from the window.  His fingers squeeze Tony’s in a fast, panicky staccato.

“The visit is forty-five minutes long,” he tells Tony, flitting from smoothing Tony’s jacket to touching his cheek to grabbing his hands, “But I don’t know long it will take to,” he swallows, “To get to him.”  

Tony catches Loki’s hands with his hands, his lips with his lips.  “I’ll wait for you,” he promises.  “If you need anything, call me.”

Loki nods like he’s being hauled at high speed over rocks, closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and nods again.  Once.  

“Here.”  He lifts his bag off his shoulder and holds it out, strap draped over the flat of his palm.  “I don’t want to have to worry about getting this back.”  Tony glances over Loki’s shoulder at the guard, who has crossed his arms and is watching them from the doorway.  He takes the proffered bag and hitches it up onto his shoulder.  Loki squeezes Tony’s hands and steps away.  The door opens for him as he reaches it and he disappears into the dark, not looking back.

 

For lack of anything better to do, Tony sits on the bench.  He folds and refolds his hands in his lap. It’s impossible to get comfortable. There’s a security camera staring right at him, it feels like, mounted on the wall across the street. He can’t see the lens, but he imagines he can, imagines it focusing on him, spinning its aperture a little more open. Imagines the nameless French security guard on the other end, watching. 

It’s the first time in a while that Tony’s spent a lot of time near a place like this without being inside it.  He thinks about gravity wells and black holes and whether sorrow has mass. 

He slides his phone out of his pocket and fucks around on the Internet for a while. Unsurprisingly, the world has continued to turn: the 24-hour news cycle has kicked up some new political articles and a couple of the journals he subscribes to have new digital content. He doesn’t read any of it, finds his attention sliding back towards the blank, forbidding wall of the prison.

It’s only been ten minutes.

He opens his mail program and scrolls blindly down to Rhodie’s email. He’s probably worried, Rhodie. Tony probably fucked up his Christmas. He was probably having a great time, eating turkey or whatever not turkey they ate in Turkey on Christmas, probably drinking with some buddies out of uniform. And then he had to read Tony’s downer of an email and think up some way of providing existential comfort that wouldn’t get censored or whatever, and leave whatever party he was at to respond, which is really not how Tony thinks he would like to spend a Christmas afternoon. Or evening. Or Boxing Day. Rhodie’s still ahead of him a little, time zone-wise.

His phone tells him he’s ignored Rhodie’s email for three days. 

When he opens it, it tells him he has no money left. 

Specifically, it tells him that his roaming privileges are suspended due to lack of funds, which is impossible since he owns the satellites that his phone would be contacting to provide him with mobile internet. Or, well, technically, Stark Industries owns those satellites. As he watches, his phone gives a tiny alert tone—the kind he’s programmed in on a whim to let him know if someone was trying to remote access it—and goes dark.

It takes him about five minutes to ascertain that the thing has been bricked. Or, he thinks it’s five minutes. He doesn’t have a functioning timepiece anymore, and his head is buzzing with infinite, staticky grayness. He looks down at the hands in front of him, holding the phone. He watches them twitch and move, restless, on the cracked black screen. None of the feeling registers in his brain. Maybe his nerves are broken, frayed off somewhere between his spinal column and his wrists. The parts of him that are void feel bigger, like they’re swelling, like he’s going to sink through the bench—he can’t even feel it anymore, smooth wood, should feel hard, maybe warm from his exothermic body heat, metabolism giving off energy, exciting the atoms in the bench, every moment making them more similar, him and the bench, energetically speaking.  He feels very small. Like an orb, a brain on a swivel, a transparent eyeball, he remembers reading somewhere, years ago; isolated electrical impulses. 

He can’t breathe. Can’t count his breaths. It’s like he’s stuck at the beginning of an algorithm, unable to move past the first iteration. 

One, one, two—fuck, three—five—time is a spiral, the ant rotates on the wire but thinks it’s on a line; Tony can feel the extra dimensions; he’s dizzy with it; nothing is cumulative anymore because everything he had is gone.

He can’t sit here any longer. He has to move.

He has to know what time it is.

The surroundings are gray. His transparent eyeball floats, like the opening screen on a video game: Tony a small pixelated avatar with one running animation, moving in place. 

An ambulance screams at him and for a second, he’s jolted back. He’s in the middle of a road, feet burning in his shoes, breath heaving, Loki’s bag swinging into his hip. The ambulance swerves, a hasty, juddering arc that squeals around him. He doesn’t have time to put his hands up. The wind hits him, buffets him hard towards the far curve. He lets it push him. The ambulance wails on. It sounds petulant, berating—not relieved.

He keeps moving. He still has to see a clock.

The first thing he feels is his breathing, again. He’s taking big gulps of air like he’s drowning. Automatic somatic process, maintaining homeostasis. His body trying to right itself. 

Back in control, he ratchets his breaths per minute down a little, holding air in his lungs. Pain signals register from his feet—mild ones, raw ones, like he’s been running. Not blistered, as far as he can tell. He’s sweating, too, in cold, clammy rivulets down his neck and his back. He considers taking his coat off, but his arms still feel akimbo, too out of his control to finesse through the complex process of removing them from his sleeves.

His phone is a dead weight against his thigh.

He shuts his eyes and bites his lip and digs his fingers hard into the meat of his palms. Not again. His ribcage is doing a commendable job of containing the percussive pressure of his heart. He presses his hands—awkwardly, has to think about how to bend his elbows, just a hinge, no rotation—to the back of his head so he can feel where he ends.

He’s on a sidewalk by a strip of urban greenery. Ivy riots over a low fence line. Across the street stands a choppy row of apartments. There’s something colorful on the wall of the building on the far corner.

Drawing closer, Tony discovers that it’s a painting of a boy. Crouched down, he’s still twice Tony’s height and rendered in semi-realistic grayscale. One of his hands lifts the facsimile of the building’s skirting, revealing a pooled rainbow that bleeds out onto the sidewalk. The boy’s other hand is holding a paintbrush. A single window box of red geraniums hangs above and behind the painting.

The painting seems to be advertising for the small gallery housed in the ground floor of the building. It’s closed. A dangling sign in the window informs Tony that it opens from 3-9pm, Tuesday through Sunday.

It’s not 3pm yet, then. But beyond that, Tony is still completely fucking lost. The street sign on the gallery building is useless to him without a map.

He takes a left on the boulevard at the end of the block.

Now that his brain has resumed normal sensory processing, Tony finds himself in a district of blocky apartments rising square and choppy over small shops. Plaster interspersed with concrete; window ledges in orate, vine-wrapped iron and glass; the housing complexes move by in blocks, choppy, disordered memorials to the passage of time. Streets peel off like spokes of a wheel, but Tony sticks to the main boulevard. The prison is off a big street, he remembers that much.

He comes to a multi-road intersection and keeps on straight. His palms are starting to sweat. Loki’s bag bounces at his hip, like an anchor. Like a metronome. He wishes it was bigger, heavier. He needs something tied tight around his ankles with no give. Something solid enough to stop him.

Eventually, Tony stumbles onto the Seine. He’s on a wide concrete bridge studded with ornate streetlights. His hands are clenched on the railing, knuckles going white against the peach-painted cement and the backdrop of brown, rushing water. Some buoy or pillar or locke juts up right under the surface at the centre of the flow, like a spearhead or a signpost, kicking up two symmetrical foaming white wakes.

He’s back in Boston, on all the nights he visited that bridge; all the days he felt it, pulling like a vortex at the center of his gut. Like an anchor. Like magnetic north. He stares at the wakes as they tumble and roll, water beating itself in a chaos of intersecting waveforms.

Weariness seeps, slow and creeping, into Tony’s bones. His feet are a cacophony of pain, throbbing in counter time. He’s so tired. Tired of running, through Paris and across the globe; away from Obie; away from himself. He’s tired of feeling like one of those donation tables at the Children’s Museum that funnels coins in ever-descending spirals until they drop out of sight.

He’s tired of making this choice.

He closes his eyes, feels his feet take his weight against the heat of blood and blisters. Feels the railing, cold and solid, in his hands.

Makes the choice.

 

There’s a bar on the bank of the river with a big terrace out back that overlooks the water. The bartender is sweeping snow off metal tables. It’s freezing: Tony can’t imagine that anyone would want to sit outside. The whiskey gives the whole scene a sepia retina when he squints through his glass.

He just came in to ask for the time and to get directions. He meant to get a glass of water because it was going to be a long walk back to the prison. His feet and his head are throbbing; light slices at his eyes. He says so, pressing his hands to his temples like that might help, but it’s not that kind of headache and he knows it. They guy next to him—the only other customer here this early, at 2pm—slides him two pills that he chases with something that burns.

Vodka, probably.

Time passes, or he assumes it does. He keeps waiting to feel better before he leaves. His head is fuzzy now, which is a nice change. His whole body feels fuzzy. Probably not great to walk on, but he should be OK as long as he remembers the directions. Tony  watches atoms at the tips of his fingers slough off and drift lazily out the open doors, like they’re getting a head start.

He almost laughs.

 

In quantum physics, particles are thought to simultaneously exist in infinite probability states until acted upon by an outside force. In some interpretations, observation--the interruption of void by instrumentation or consciousness--collapses the wave function--all those dazzling potential states--into one observed reality. In others, the universe splits at the moment of observation, creating infinite parallel worlds that are blithely unaware of the moment of splitting. 

In another universe, Tony floats, face-down in the black Boston water. His ribs are crushed, and whatever insects can survive the Charles crawl into and out of his mouth, like breathing.

Some theorists say the split only occurs at the level of the mind. That each person has infinite minds in infinite states within the same brain, and that each mind is completely certain of the state of the particle it observes. The brain processes information from the minds by consensus: whichever state--say, up or down--is apprehended by the greatest number of minds becomes the state that is observed and reported.

A nonzero number of Tony’s minds are certain that he climbed over the railing on the Seine, stared at the twin wakes splitting at the submerged post, neither calmer nor rougher than the other; and if there was no difference in outcome--

There are interpretations that say that the force that collapses the wave function, or causes the split between universes, is not instrumentation alone, but the interjection of consciousness.

Tony is awake.

He feels like, while he slept, someone dislocated his jaw and ran a belt sander down his esophagus. He’s had his stomach pumped before and it never feels any better. He seems to recall some author saying that existence is pain. 

Something beeps: a clean, machine beep. Slow, regular—time? Some sort of time. Sliced up, stacked. He matches his breaths to it; has to keep them shallow, because of his throat.

Someone is crying. Small sounds, soft, more breath than anything. There’s soft pressure on his hand, warmth—someone’s holding it. That can’t be right. Maybe it’s not his hand, after all. Maybe he’s not awake yet.

He’s heard you can’t open your eyes in dreams. When he was a kid, he had a nightmare that he would try to wake himself up from, only to find himself in a control room a la the Enterprise, except instead of instrument panels it was full of banks and banks of shut eyes. He knew if he could find his own and open them, he’d wake up. But there were hundreds of them, thousands, blues and hazels and greens and browns that were just the wrong color or the wrong shape, and he’d run in circles, futile, until he gave up and collapsed on the floor, trapped.

Tony opens his eyes.

The light hurts to look at.

Something dark in his peripheral vision—a respite. Black hair and a dark sweater.

Loki.

He’s looking down at his lap, thumbing at his phone, sniffling softly. His free hand is resting on Tony’s like he’s forgotten to move it. Tony twists his wrist to wrap his fingers around the back of Loki’s hand.

Loki’s phone clatters to the floor. He stares at Tony, covers his mouth, puffy-eyed, snot or tears or something dripping under his nose. He’s a breath sucked in, about to be let out. Will he shout? Cry? Tony wants to cut him off, to apologize, to explain, but his throat is stuck. His lips too dry to open.

“I’ll go tell the nurse you’re awake.” Loki squeezes Tony’s hand before he lets go, and wipes his eyes as he leaves the room.

The nurse is young and pretty and speaks good English. Tony’s going to be checked out the next day. They just need to make sure he’s properly hydrated.

Loki sits by Tony’s side the whole time, hand clenched in Tony’s, not talking. He smiles thinly when Tony thanks the nurse for her time.

Guilt feels like a physical weight between them. Tony tries not to blink as he watches Loki sit and sniff and blow his nose and fold the tissues, one-handed, into tiny triangles. He’s sorely tempted to keep waiting, to steal as many moments as possible. 

“I’m out of money.” Loki looks up. Tony can only read weariness in his face. “Completely. Accounts frozen kind of out of money.” He takes a huge breath. “So that hotel is not. Going to work. Tonight.” He winces. “Sorry.”

“I’ll get a hostel,” Loki says. “It’s fine.” 

He says it like a fact. Tony closes his eyes and breathes.

 

#

DAY 24

Tony gets released from the hospital late the next morning. He kicks it in the gift shop until Loki shows up, pink-cheeked and mussed, with two croissants wrapped in a greasy paper towel, both for Tony.

The hostel he’d found is housed in a shitty, cramped apartment building a few metro stops from the hospital. The common room is small and painted bright colors with decals of famous revolutionaries on the walls. The one public-use computer sits in a corner under Che Guevara. 

Loki perches on a faded leather couch as Tony prods the computer into telling him that yes, all his accounts are frozen and no, there’s nothing he can do about it.

He collapses on the couch and slides a little into Loki. His hand is shaking when he runs it through his hair. Loki catches his fingers and lays their hands on his thigh. His thumb traces the band-aid the nurse put over Tony’s IV site.

There’s an old wooden coffee table in front of the couch with a sagging collection of boardgames stacked where a drawer used to be. A battered copy of Risk: Le Jeu Mondale de la Strategie droops over a backgammon board in a green leather case.

All it would take is Tony leaning forward and reaching, just a little. His hand would slide out of Loki’s. The cardboard would be soft to the touch. They could waste a day, easy.

Tony looks down at the miracle of Loki’s hand tangled with his. He pictures him leaving the jail: blinking in the light, full of some buzzing energy Tony will never see. In his head, Loki looks over at the bench, finds it empty.

He doesn’t know where Loki went after that. Did he find Tony in the hospital? Did Loki call the ambulance?

“You left me,” Loki had screamed at him, back in Boston.

“You stayed,” Tony whispers, now. Loki squeezes his hand.

 

The hostel sells international calling cards for cheap. Tony purchases 60 minutes of talk time to the States, for Loki’s phone. 

Pepper never changed her number. She answers on the third ring.

“Hello?”

Tony’s voice is stuck in his throat again. He has to cough to shake it loose. Beside him, Loki’s quick fingers trick over a ball-and-pocket puzzle he’d found next to the backgammon.

“Hey, Pep. ’S Tony.”

“Tony!” A rush of loud static. Tony holds Loki’s phone away from his ear. “Thank god! Obidiah said you weren’t coming back.”

It feels like the center of mass of Tony’s universe has shifted, just slightly. Like he’s entered free fall. “I—what? I’m still—” He hadn’t told her he’d left the States “—In France, what—”

She’s crying big, loud, heaving sobs that break over Tony like waves. It had never been like this, before. Her sorrow had always been sharp. Honed by disappointment and, by the end, disdain.

“ _ Dead _ , Tony.” Her voice cracks on his name. “Obidiah said you were  _ dead _ .”

When Tony’s mother was dying, and Tony was spending countless hours sitting at her door, beating his fists into the floor until they bled, the family butler, Jarvis, would pull down a thick book of logic problems and ask for Tony’s help with them. It wouldn’t take long for Tony to get so wrapped up that he barely noticed Jarvis padding gauze against the pulpy  flesh of his hands. He’d keep at it, working puzzle after puzzle until his grief seemed contained again. Like building a sea wall, or a pressure chamber.

He remembers clearly the feeling of working those puzzles: like his hair was electric, his scalp still buzzing, too thin and porous to keep the strength of his feeling inside—but he could wait in the book, for however long he needed.

When Howard died, Tony thought he was too old, and his anger too fierce, for the puzzles to do any good.

He doesn’t know where the book ended up, but here he is again, staring at something huge and incomprehensible that hurts him. 

He taps Loki softly on the knee. “You didn’t let anyone know I was in the hospital, did you?”

Concern creases Loki’s brows. “No. Why?”

“Tell you in a sec.”

So Obidiah wouldn’t have known about Tony’s brush with poisoning-via-mixing-meds unless the hospital had called him. Which they might have: he  _ is _ Tony’s legal next of kin and medical power of attorney. But nobody had told  _ Tony _ he was in critical condition. And the other times he’d had his stomach pumped, he’d been in a lot worse shape.

“What did Obie tell you, Pepper?”

The white noise of Pepper blowing her nose. “He wasn’t specific. Just that you were out of contact—he implied it was some sort of accident.”

“When?”

“Yesterday, early. It woke me up.”

France is six hours ahead of Boston. Tony’s phone shut off around noon, which would have been 6 a.m. He doesn’t know when exactly he got checked into the hospital, but it was after 1 p.m. Pepper is an early riser—or at least she used to be. She loved to go running in the deep pre-dawn, when she was the only warm thing out on the cold, sleeping streets. It was something that had worked well between them. Tony’d be up when she left and when she got back. In those days, he couldn’t really sleep. 

He’d be surprised if she was still in bed at 6 a.m. Obidiah had to know the first thing Pepper would do is call Tony's cell. So either Tony's phone had gone offline earlier than he'd thought, or--

But Loki had been using his phone on the bus--

And it was a remote reset anyway, done through Stark satellites. Way, way before the hospital would've called. The reason, actually, in a long string of causality, that the hospital  _ would _ have called.

Loki’s watching him carefully, knee pressed against Tony’s. His ball and pocket game abandoned in his lap.

Was Obidiah’s plan just to let Tony run out of cash and starve in Paris? That seemed messy and loose: Tony might do exactly what he is doing and call for help. 

For a moment, the kindly old French man at the bar pops back into his mind. He'd offered Tony painkillers. At the time he'd seemed nice, in that bleary way people were nice to Tony after he'd had a few drinks: holding doors open for him, calling taxis, bringing him water. Now, the man looked shadowy and hunched, the depths of his coat hiding the Stark Industries label on, what, a burner phone? 

Ridiculous.

Occam’s Razor. The simplest solution is usually the correct one. Unless you don’t know all the variables at play, in which case you can’t know what the simplest solution is.

New tack.

Systems resist change unless acted upon by an outside force. Undisturbed, Tony would muddle his way through his degree and, upon graduating, take over from Obie as CEO of Stark Industries. 

Disturbed—

“Pep? You sitting down?”

Pepper gives a watery laugh. “Yes, Tony.”

“Great. And you have your phone, obviously. I’m gonna need you to make some calls for me.”

 

The battered game of Risk, it turns out, is missing several pieces, substitutes of which have been fabbed with broken pencils and wads of tape. Loki lays out the board with quiet, deft fingers. Tony watches, entranced at his surety, his ease. He wonders if Loki has always moved like this, and he, Tony, simply failed to notice.

Every shift of his jeans on the couch feels like Pepper calling back. Every clatter of luggage on the stairs is someone breaking in--to poison him again, to stage a dramatic rescue; Tony can't be sure. Someone fiddles around making tea and for a long moment Tony is caught, the sound of the gurgling electric kettle transposing his lab in front of him like a weak overlay, all the mess of his work bench strewn over the hostel’s slabby wooden tables, a cutout of Malcolm X staring balefully from over Hammer’s lab bench.

Loki’s hand on his knee shakes him out of it. His fingernails have gotten long and they're inked a streaky purply black. Tony doesn't remember this, either. Did Loki manicure himself while Tony was asleep in the hospital? Or while Loki was lying awake on his back in a narrow hostel bed, fanning his fingers above him to check his work?

“Let's get lunch,” Loki tells him as he interlaces their fingers.

 

They get seats at a cafe at the end of the block. The phone is in Loki’s pocket and he sits across from Tony, deconstructing his croissant. Tony had no choice but to gulp at his cappuccino and watch Loki’s face.

“How was the jail?” Tony asks. Loki starts. He carefully arranges the pieces of his croissant on his plate to approximate the whole. 

“It was nice.” He makes a face. “Obviously grim and horrifying and stark, of course; I'm not saying it was  _ pleasant _ . But it was nice. To meet him.” His mouth goes soft at the edges. “He looks like me.”

Cars pass slowly by behind Loki's head. Tony spoons foam off the side of his cup.

“I--I won't be able to write him, really. He's very well-secured. He's not even in contact with my mother. They were dissidents together, he said, in Viet Nam. That's how he met Odin, when Odin was there with the Marines. How they befriended each other--I don't know. He didn't say. Laufey didn't say. 

“He's been in prison since I was born. He can't contact anyone on the outside, really, except for his lawyer. So he couldnt--even though he wanted to, he couldn’t--”

Loki reaches for a napkin, blows his nose, folds it back up as he talks. “He couldn't have contacted me. Even though he wanted to.” 

He takes a staggering breath. Bits of croissant skitter off his plate. “He smiled, when I walked in. He didn't even know me yet and he smiled at me, just for walking in the door.”

 

Loki pays, and he leads Tony down to the river. He keeps ahold of Tony's hand as they walk: it must be obvious, how Tony's drawn to Loki’s back pocket, where his phone is. Intellectually, he knows that Pepper will need time to do what he asked her to do. But now that he has a theory, his hands are twitchy. He wants to be working.

Loki keeps their pace slow. He drags Tony to look at stands of cut flowers with handmade kitsch dripping from the awnings. He lingers over an ornament: balsa wood laser cut into a fleur-des-lis & stained a deep mahogany. Tony tries to shake him off enough to sneakily buy it for him, but Loki refuses to let go, steering them along the quay with a cheery “Au revoir!” over his shoulder at the shopkeeper.

It all feels so normal. 

“Are you mad?” Tony asks, and braces himself for impact.

“I don't know. Not entirely. For a while I was, and then I thought it was my fault, but--” He shrugs tightly.

Tony swings their hands in a wide arc.

“I wanted to do better. Hell, I  _ want _ to do better.”

“I know.” Like Loki’s still stating facts.

“I--” He’s never said this part before. It’s only when he says it now that he realizes how long it’s been true. “I don't know if I can do better.”

Loki squeezes his hand, rubs his thumb over the cracked skin of Tony’s knuckles. He doesn't say anything, but he keeps walking, next to Tony, holding his hand.

#

DAY 25

Pepper calls back at 3am Paris time. Loki thuds to the floor next to Tony's bed, hair everywhere, and shoves his phone at him before clambering back onto the top bunk. Tony slips into the hallway and down to the common room, phone tucked under his ear.

“Hey Pep.”

“Tony.” She sounds exhausted. “I talked to Sherine. She’s drawing up a new company order. Under Howard’s original will--” a faint rustling of papers-- “You were to inherit the company as soon as you came of age, which was eighteen.”

There's a pause. Tony realizes she's expecting an answer. He grunts.

“Then you co-signed an extension with Obidiah placing him as your surrogate until you finished your PhD.”

Tony grunts again. He remembers that, Obie’s hand around his shoulders, fingers wrapping around the back of his neck; he'd felt young and small and like the board members were all expecting him to pull a rabbit out of a hat or something, and all he wanted was to run back to his lab and not  _ deal _ with any of it. 

“Sherine says since you're old enough to run the company, you can void the extension at any time, as long as you have cause.” Sherine--the lawyer who’d pulled strings to get Loki into the prison. Tony doesn’t really know who she is, but he needs to buy her something nice. A fruit basket, or something. “You'll have to meet with her to draw up and sign a statement of cause, but you definitely have enough, legally. Criminal charges will be harder to make stick, but Sherine says you have good grounds for a civil case, should you wish to pursue one.”

Tony pinches his nose, watches the shocks of color waver across his field of vision like snow on a CRT monitor. This is everything he wasn't ready for at eighteen, everything he's still not ready for now. Finishing his PhD was supposed to be some sort of training camp for adulthood and yet here he is, thrown into it without having read any of the instructions.

“Let's leave any prosecution for now,” he says, because he has to say something, and because the thought of facing Obidiah across a courtroom makes something ugly start swimming in his gut. “I'll void the extra thing and then what happens?”

“Then you become CEO of Stark Industries.”

Tony finds himself sitting on a couch, staring over at the lifeless eyes of Guevara and Frida Kahlo. Communism sounds pretty good right now--he wouldn’t have to carry the weight of the US’s top defense contractor, wouldn’t have to face all those people from the Christmas party every day. Shit. It would be like the Christmas party every day, with the suits and the light breaking on chandeliers and the too-close air and the people, everywhere, watching him, all those eyes on the panels and none of them his and nowhere to wake up to. It would be trading Obidiah for a score more, like the myth of the Hydra. And there would be Pepper, behind him, pursed lips and crossed arms, infinitely more put together and adept; actually trained for this kind of thing. It’d be like entering a three-year old into an Olympic swimming event. All he would do is drown.

“Hey, Pepper.” She hmmm’s in his ear. “You should be CEO.”

“What! Tony--”

“Hear me out. You’re better at it than I ever would be. You know that--we both know that. I--I don’t want to repeat Boston one-point-oh or have another Obie situation. Not that--I trust you to not go how Obie’s gone, obviously, but what I mean is that I don’t want to have you be a surrogate for me while I’m busy fucking everything up royally. So. You should just take it. Take the company and make something good out of it. That sound good to you?”

He waits out the static. He can hear her thinking it over. He expected this to feel bigger to him, like staring out at dark water. But instead, it feels like letting out a breath that’s been held for too long. 

“Yes,” Pepper says. “Okay.” It sounds like she’s smiling. “I’ll have Sherine draft an agreement.”

 

In the room, Loki is curled up, facing the wall. Tony slides back between the sheets of the bottom bunk, reaches blindly for Loki’s charger, black against the dim of the room. Across from them, two more dudes are passed out in another bunk. The room smells warm and close, like their stale, open beers. 

Above him, Loki moves in his sleep, his body weight bowing the slats of the bedframe into parabolic arcs. Tony finally finds his charger, plugs in his phone and turns it off once he’s sure it’s charging. Tucks it under his own pillow to give back in the morning proper. 

  
  


Tony insists they spend the next day doing stereotypical Parisian tourist things, because in all likelihood Pepper will have plane tickets for them before the sun goes down in Boston. Loki lets Tony drag them to the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, falls into his side and pulls faces when Tony leans back to take selfies with Loki’s phone. In Notre Dame, he walks slackjawed through the aisles and the ambulatory. Loki stops in a side chapel and pays for two tea candles, which he lights and then stares at as they burn. Tony wraps an arm around his waist and Loki leans his cheek on the top of Tony’s head. 

“Baldr,” he says, pointing at the left-hand candle. “And—what I thought of my family.”

Tony hums and fans his hand across Loki’s lower back. They watch the candles until Loki steps away.

From the roof of the cathedral, Paris splays out around them like a broken wheel, streets like spokes splintered in every direction. Tony takes photos of Loki against the railing, leaning back into the wind, his hair blowing out from under his hat like ink running in water. Loki had picked out a pair of knitted fingerless gloves in a deep navy earlier, and his fingers are bone white against them when he reaches up to drag strands of hair out of his mouth. The ink is starting to chip off his fingernails. Tony looks at him and looks at him. He missed whatever unknotted the tension at Loki’s spine, back in the prison or directly after it. He missed Loki growing into this, wild, far-flung in something like joy, his gums peeking pink at the edges of his smile. Tony missed that, and maybe he held it back, giving Loki more pain than he deserved.

“Come here!” Loki beckons him, and Tony goes. 

 

#

   DAY 27

Tony and Loki land in Boston in the waning hours of New Year’s Eve. Logan is dark and cavernous and mostly closed. Pepper’s waiting for them at the baggage claim with a lady in a pantsuit and dark, curly hair.

“Sherine,” she says, sticking out a hand. Tony shakes it, hoping he doesn’t smell too strongly of airplane.

“Pleasure,” he tells her. She brandishes a thick stack of papers flagged with sticky arrows. He starts signing where she tells him as she narrates what each document is and Loki and Pepper hunt for their luggage.

When he’s done, they all pile into a taxi. Sherine gets dropped off first, at a towering building downtown that has to be her office. Tony doesn’t recognize it as a Stark property, but he also doesn’t know where most of the company’s holdings are, and he doesn’t need to. Won’t ever need to, now.

“Who’s next?” the cab driver asks. Both Tony and Pepper look at Loki, who shrugs like he was expecting this. 

“I’d rather not surprise my parents on New Year’s Eve—”

“Stay the night with me,” Pepper tells him firmly. “I have plenty of space.” She swivels around in the passenger seat to include Tony. “You’re welcome too, Tony.”

He considers it. The warmth and the champagne--no, the sparkling cider--Pepper would uncork if they asked her to. Sleeping on the floor of that huge, dead living room with Loki oozing off the couch above him.

“Yeah,” he says. “Thanks.”

#

DAY 28

Tony goes home the next morning while Loki phones his parents to tell them he’s back in the states. Pepper’s out doing pre-CEO things, because business never sleeps. She’d clasped on pearls in her kitchen, impeccably put together like she hadn’t been up most of the night before, and breezed out the door while Tony was still undoing the knots in his back. She’ll be good, he knows it. 

His apartment smells musty and old. It’s too cold to properly air it out, but he cracks a couple windows and runs the fan in the bathroom. He sits on his bed, thinking about what he wants to grab, and then he remembers.

The bottle of whiskey is right where he put it. There’s a little over 100 mils left.

He digs up three shot glasses and gives them a cursory rinse. While they’re drying, he heads back to his bedroom and clambers up into his closet, hunting for his Box of Unfinished Projects. He finds it, dusty, hidden behind some T-shirts and a few wrinkled chapters of his thesis. 

In the box are an assortment of mismatched electronics, pieces of solder, electrical tape, a spool of copper wire. And, most importantly, puffs of fiberglass insulation that he’d stolen from the campus construction contractors way back in undergrad.

He packs the fiberglass into the shot glasses with two fingers and takes them over to the French doors overlooking his balcony. He comes back for the booze and a lighter he keeps stored in his junk drawer. He pours the booze into the glasses, soaking the fiberglass. There’s a little left when he’s done, slick and amber in the bottom of the bottle. He contemplates: one last shot.

He opens the door, steps into the cold, and pours it out.

The fiberglass won’t burn long, but it will burn bright. He slips on two pairs of socks and sits down cross-legged. Takes the lighter and touches it in turn to the rim of each glass.

One candle each for Maria, Howard, and Obidiah.

He watches them burn.

It only takes a couple of minutes for the alcohol to be consumed. The fiberglass sits, dry and blackened in the shot glasses. He scoops them all up at once, with the bottle, and tosses it all down the building’s garbage chute.

 

“Tony—

“Straight up? I don’t know how we all do it. Some of us don’t. You never know what’s going to get to someone or when. Maybe it’s the heat, maybe it’s the isolation, maybe it’s the shitty internet or the food or the IUDs or the reports you hear about all the civilians who didn’t make it and should have. Some people get disillusioned first and some don’t. Some are disillusioned forever and keep going. 

“I guess since it’s the little things that get you, it’s the little things that get you through, too.  Turks don’t celebrate Christmas on Christmas it turns out so we had to book seats in this restaurant that had a Christmas program all done just for expats. They decorated with all this greenery and had, no joke, pigs in blankets as an entree. The staff did this cabaret performance afterwards, with Santa hats and all. They had to read the lyrics to Christmas carols off of sheets, but it reminded me of singing carols at Christmas assembly in elementary school. And then afterwards we went to this bar that someone’s friend knew about, and I shit you not they were selling Christmas trees out back. It was blazing hot but they had real live Christmas trees. I don’t believe in that Hallmark magic of Christmas bullshit but after months in the desert those trees smelled like the best thing in the world.

“I don’t know what’s going to work for you. Sniff a Christmas tree. It might help.

“I’ll see you as soon as I can get real leave. You’d better stick around for that.

“—Rhodie” 

 

#

DAY 366

The night of the company Christmas party, Tony is running late. He has his best ugly sweater on under his coat, but the convenience store down the street had been out of plastic cutlery. He turns up at around eight thirty with a 40-count of light blue forks coughed up from a Stop & Shop near the metro. 

Things are in full swing by the time he arrives. The children’s museum is decked out in LED lights that intelligently respond to temperature. Right now they’re uniformly white, indicating that all sensors are reading an ambient air temperature of less than 4 degrees Fahrenheit. Music trickles out from inside, heavy with electric guitar.

Everyone is in the conference room, about to get neck deep in holiday pot luck. Tony chucks the forks on the end of the table next to a stack of more seasonally appropriate red-and-green plates and napkins. Anne, the volunteer director who is also holding sway as Director of the Hordes tonight, flashes him a smile and a thumbs up. “Tony’s here!” she bellows through a makeshift, hand-based megaphone. “That means we can eat like civilised people. So form a line along the  _ outside _ of the room, please. Outside of the room. Thanks!”

A great scraping of plastic chairs as people stand and start shuffling towards the food table. Tony swims against the current, looking for somewhere to put his jacket.

“Hey.”

Loki’s behind him, in the hideously green sweater he’d texted Tony about before he left campus. Most of the torso is dedicated to a portrait of the Grinch rendered in fake fur. Somehow, he’s acquired a pair of fuzzy reindeer antlers on a headband. He’s got bags under his eyes, dusted with some glitter that’s presumably from the sweater. 

“Hey!” Tony gets up on his tiptoes to kiss him, careful not to jostle the two very full cups of apple juice Loki’s balancing in his hands. 

“I got us seats over by the projector.” Loki gestures stiffly with his head. Little bells tinkle on his antlers.

“Cool.” Tony snags an apple juice and chugs it. “I’m gonna drop my stuff.”

Before he can step away, Loki drops his head to Tony’s shoulder, bells loud in Tony’s ear. “Just--” his hands smoothing down Tony’s arms. Tony tries to set his empty cup down without dislodging Loki too much.

“What’s up?” Tony wants to run his fingers through Loki’s hair but he doesn’t want to dislodge the antlers. He settles for petting at the back of Loki’s neck.

“I miss him.” 

“Yeah.” 

“I just--he would have been happy for me. Baldr. He would have wanted to meet you.”

Tony’s chuckle catches the both of them off guard. “I would’ve been honored. And terrified. Mostly honored.”

Loki pulls back a little. His hands are cold when he laces his fingers with Tony’s. “Laufey wanted to meet you, too.”

Someone jostles them on the way to the buffet table. The music has been turned down, Tony thinks. He’s not sure what his face is doing.

“You never told me that.” Even to his own ears, he sounds awed.

“I know. And we can’t--obviously we can’t just run away again. But maybe Sherine can--?” He shakes his head, cheeks all blotchy red. If his hair wasn’t held back under the antlers, it’d be falling into his eyes. “We can talk later?”

“Yeah. Yeah no absolutely, for sure, one hundred percent more talking later. Um.” 

Loki pecks him on the lips, shuts him up. 

“Hey--” Tony grabs his elbow. He wants to have something bigger to give Loki in return, but this is all he’s got. “MIT is lighting their tree tonight. Wanna go?”

**Author's Note:**

> The central theme of the piece is the perpetual confrontation of suicidal urges. Multiple methods of self-harm & suicide are discussed and depicted throughout. 
> 
> Tony is an alcoholic who experiences panic attacks, dissociative episodes, & depression. Obidiah Stane currently emotionally & psychologically abuses him, and the fic mentions past physical abuse & neglect by Howard Stark from Tony's childhood.


End file.
